CISE Research Instrumentation: Application and Evaluation of a Low Cost Parallel Processing Platform

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9617384 Apon, Amy W. Pickens III, David R. Vanderbilt University CISE Research Instrumentation: Low Cost Parallel Processing Platform An instrumentation grant will fund an assembly of a network of low-cost computers linked by high-speed interconnections. Our low-cost, high-speed network will serve as a test-bed for three projects, which will simultaneously advance research in the application areas and demonstrate the cost-effectiveness of the network as a parallel processing platform. One project will focus on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which indicates areas of the brain that are actively processing information. Current processing techniques can take hours on large data sets. Software will be reimplemented on the parallel system with the goal of reducing processing time so that fMRI is more practical for research into brain function. A second project will focus on data mining, which discovers `meaningful' patterns in data. Data is being amassed at a rate that far exceeds our ability to analyze it. The network will allow parallelism to be exploited for analyzing scientific and industrial data. The third project will focus on techniques such as thread and data placement and communication strategies that improve the performance of parallel applications on the high-speed network. The experimental platform will allow various techniques to be developed and evaluated. Analytic models will be used to generalize the results across comparable architectures.