MRI: Collaborative Research: Acquisition of an IBM BlueGene/L Supercomputer

这个合作项目是由美国国家大气研究中心（04-21498阁楼），科罗拉多大学博尔德分校（04-20873 Tufo）和科罗拉多大学丹佛分校（04-20985 Mandel），解决了在地球科学、航空航天工程和数学应用中实现实际千万亿次计算的技术障碍，该公司的目标是获得一台具有2048个计算处理器、64个服务处理器和20 TB存储容量的单机柜BlueGene/L超级计算机。支持大气，野火建模，飞机模拟和高性能数值算法的研究项目，该项目研究硬件，软件和应用问题。一个由大气科学家、计算科学家、工程师、应用数学家组成的团队，和将应用程序映射到高度并行系统的专家提出了计算机架构师之间的紧密耦合，这些架构师分析新设计上计算内核的性能（通常是孤立的）和大气和工程建模师以及提出新算法的可扩展求解器的设计师（通常没有来自计算机架构师的直接反馈）从下一代超级计算机中提取最高性能。在过去的一年中，该团队的一部分成员与IBM沃森BlueGene/L开发团队合作，并获得了具有512个节点的BlueGene/L原型。 因此，这个紧密耦合的12名科学家小组共同研究计算问题，同时考虑问题的架构，算法和建模方面，为这项工作提供了特殊的价值。该项目预计将加速计算科学的长期进展速度，这可能对理解对社会至关重要的基本科学问题（如气候变化和野火）产生深远影响。此外，该项目还提供了具体的合作和教育计划，充分利用了丹佛大学学生群体中庞大的城市少数民族人口和积极的博尔德大学招生计划。虽然具体的计划还不清楚，但PI都有与不同背景的学生合作的记录。

This collaborative project among University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, NCAR (04-21498 Loft), University of Colorado-Boulder (04-20873 Tufo), and University of Colorado-Denver (04-20985 Mandel), addressing the technical obstacles to achieving practical petascale computing in geoscience, aerospace engineering, and mathematical applications, aims at acquiring a one-cabinet BlueGene/L supercomputer with 2048 compute processors, 64 service processors, and 20 terabytes of storage. Supporting research projects in atmospherics, wildfire modeling, aircraft simulation, and high performance numerical algorithms, the project studies hardware, software, and application issues. A team composed of atmospheric scientists, computational scientists, engineers, applied mathematicians, and experts in mapping applications to highly-parallel systems proposes a tight coupling among computer architects that analyze the performance of computational kernels on new designs (often in isolation) and atmospheric and engineering modelers and designers of scalable solvers proposing new algorithms (often without direct feedback form the computer architects) to extract the highest performance from the next generation of supercomputers. Part of the team has worked with the IBM Watson BlueGene/L development team during the past year and has had access to a BlueGene/L prototype with 512 nodes. Thus, this tightly-coupled group of 12 scientists working together on computational problems, simultaneously considering architectural, algorithmic, and modeling aspects of the problems offers special value to the work.Broader Impact: The project is expected to accelerate the long-term rate of progress in computational science, which can have a profound impact on the understanding of fundamental scientific questions (such as climate change and wildfires) that are of great importance to society. In addition, providing concrete plans for collaboration and education, the project capitalizes on the large, urban minority population in the CU-Denver student body and on the active CU-Boulder recruitment plan. Although specific plans are not clear, the PIs all have a record of working with students of diverse backgrounds.