ITR/SY: SmartApps: An Application Centric Approach to Scientific Computing

ITR/SY：SmartApps：以应用程序为中心的科学计算方法

• 批准号: 0113971
• 负责人: Lawrence Rauchwerger
• 金额: $ 46.38万
• 依托单位: Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2001
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2001-09-01 至 2007-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0113971&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: ITR; SY; SmartApps; Application; Centric

State-of-the-art run-time systems are a poor match to diverse, dynamic distributed applications because they are designed to provide support to a wide variety of applications, without much customization to individual specific requirements. Little or no information flows from the application to the run-time system to allow the latter to fully tailor its services to the application. As a result, the performance is disappointing. To address this problem, this project will pursue application-centric computing, or Smart Applications (SMARTAPPS). The overriding philosophy of SMARTAPPS is "measure, compare, and adapt if beneficial." That is, the application will continually monitor its performance and the available resources to determine if, and by how much, the application could improve its performance by restructuring. Then, if the potential performance benefit outweighs the projected overhead costs, the application will restructure itself and the underlying system accordingly. This process occurs continuously to adapt to the dynamic needs of the application and the availability of system resources. The adaptation can occur at various levels including selection of an algorithmic approach suitable for the current problem, run-time parallelization and other related compiler optimizations, tuning reconfigurable OS services (e.g. scheduling policy), and system configuration (e.g., selecting which computational resources to use). The SMARTAPPS framework provides performance monitoring and modeling components, as well as mechanisms for performing the actual restructuring, to integrate these levels of adaptation.This project will test SMARTAPPS on several important computational science applications and representative platforms throughout the development process. From computational physics, it will study discrete-ordinates codes that simulate subatomic particle transport. From computational biology, it will study a molecular dynamics code and a code that simulates protein folding and ligand binding (also known as drug docking). SMARTAPPS will be developed and run on current distributed, heterogeneous platforms, including the ASCI machines, large NUMA machines, networks of workstations, and, ultimately, the Grid.

最先进的运行时系统对于多样化的、动态的分布式应用程序来说是一个很差的匹配，因为它们被设计为提供对各种各样的应用程序的支持，而没有对单个特定需求进行太多的定制。很少或没有信息从应用程序流到运行时系统，以允许后者完全为应用程序定制其服务。结果，表现令人失望。为了解决这个问题，这个项目将追求以应用为中心的计算，或智能应用程序（SMARTAPPS）。SMARTAPPS最重要的理念是“衡量、比较和调整，如果有益的话。也就是说，应用程序将持续监视其性能和可用资源，以确定应用程序是否可以通过重组来提高其性能以及提高多少。然后，如果潜在的性能收益超过了预计的开销成本，应用程序将相应地重构自身和底层系统。这个过程不断发生，以适应应用程序的动态需求和系统资源的可用性。适配可以在各种级别发生，包括选择适合于当前问题的算法方法、运行时并行化和其他相关编译器优化、调整可重配置OS服务（例如，调度策略）和系统配置（例如，选择要使用哪些计算资源）。SMARTAPPS框架提供了性能监控和建模组件，以及执行实际重组的机制，以集成这些级别的自适应。该项目将在整个开发过程中在几个重要的计算科学应用和代表性平台上测试SMARTAPPS。从计算物理学，它将研究离散坐标代码，模拟亚原子粒子运输。从计算生物学，它将研究分子动力学代码和模拟蛋白质折叠和配体结合（也称为药物对接）的代码。SMARTAPPS将在当前的分布式异构平台上开发和运行，包括ASCI机器、大型NUMA机器、工作站网络以及最终的网格。