World-Class Science Through World Leadership in HPC

提议：0622780国际和平研究所名称：博伊索，约翰·R·阿布拉特该奖项旨在表彰为广大科学、工程研究和教育界所使用的高性能计算系统的获取、部署和运行。该系统将被称为太阳星座集群，将部署在德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校的德克萨斯高级计算中心。该项目代表了德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校、太阳微系统公司、先进微设备公司、康奈尔大学康奈尔理论中心和亚利桑那州立大学富尔顿高性能计算研究所之间的合作。太阳星座集群将极大地提高目前由NSF资助、共享使用的高性能计算设施的计算资源的综合能力，并提供比NSF目前支持的最大超级计算机大一个数量级的能力。正因为如此，它将推动科学和工程中广泛的主题领域的研究和教育，这些领域使用高性能计算来增进理解。有了这种新资源，研究人员将研究发生在地球深处的极端温度和压力下矿物的性质。他们将用它来模拟早期宇宙中结构的发展。他们将探索新物质相的结构，如夸克-胶子等离子体。这样的计算能力支持对生命周期进行建模，以捕获跨不同学科和多个规模的相互依赖关系，以创建具有全球竞争力的制造企业系统。该系统将允许研究人员检查蛋白质在生物体内合成后的折叠和振动方式。复杂的数值模拟将允许科学家和工程师进行广泛的硅内实验，否则这些实验将太困难、太昂贵或不可能在实验室进行。新系统可能实现的那种高性能计算，对于使用复杂的实验工具进行的研究和教育的成功也是必不可少的。例如，如果没有黑洞碰撞和其他天体物理事件的数值模拟产生的波形，就无法从激光干涉仪引力波观测站产生的数据中提取引力波信号；需要对地球范围项目提供的更高密度的宽带地震观测进行高分辨率地震反演，以确定地球浅层和深层结构；在地震工程模拟网络上进行同步综合计算和实验测试，以改进建筑物和桥梁的抗震设计；而先进的计算能力对于从数万亿粒子碰撞产生的PB数据中提取希格斯玻色子和超对称粒子的特征至关重要，这是大型强子对撞机的两个科学驱动力。该项目为推进上述类型的研究提供了一个令人兴奋的机会：(I)极大地扩展了科学和工程界可用的高性能计算资源的能力；(Ii)通过提供一个具有非常大的内存和非常大的处理能力的系统，扩展了可以处理的高级计算的范围。该系统将使用类似于目前许多学术机构的体系结构，许多科学和工程应用程序都已移植到该体系结构中。此外，该系统是迈向在本十年结束时在科学和工程研究和教育中使用千万亿级计算这一目标的重要垫脚石。它将提供一个平台，允许研究人员试验技术，以克服在实现千万亿级计算的道路上的一个障碍，扩展到非常大量的处理器。该计算系统还将为许多研究生和博士后提供机会，获得使用高性能计算系统的经验德克萨斯高级计算中心及其合作伙伴将通过以下方式扩大计算资源的影响：为科学和工程领域的计算研究的本科生和研究生教授高性能计算、可视化、数据分析和网格计算的现场和在线课程；与一些少数族裔服务机构的教职员工和学生合作，提供使用高性能计算资源的培训；并与GirlStart计划合作，该计划旨在支持和提高女孩对数学、科学和技术的兴趣。

Proposal: 0622780 PI Name: Boisseau, John R.ABSTRACTThis award is for the acquisition, deployment and operation of a high-performance computational system for use by the broad science and engineering research and education community. The system, to be known as the Sun Constellation Cluster, will be deployed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, located at the University of Texas at Austin. The project represents a collaboration between the University of Texas at Austin, Sun Microsystems, Advanced Micro Devices, the Cornell Theory Center at Cornell University, and the Fulton High Performance Computing Institute at Arizona State University. The Sun Constellation Cluster will greatly increase the combined capacity of the computational resources of the current NSF-funded, shared-use, high-performance computing facilities and provide a capability that is an order of magnitude larger than the largest supercomputer that NSF currently supports. Because of this, it will advance research and education across a broad range of topical areas in science and engineering that use high-performance computing to advance understanding. With this new resource, researchers will study the properties of minerals at the extreme temperatures and pressures that occur deep within the Earth. They will use it to simulate the development of structure in the early Universe. They will probe the structure of novel phases of matter such as the quark-gluon plasma. Such computing capabilities enable the modeling of life cycles that capture interdependencies across diverse disciplines and multiple scales to create globally competitive manufacturing enterprise systems. The system will permit researchers to examine the way proteins fold and vibrate after they are synthesized inside an organism. Sophisticated numerical simulations will permit scientists and engineers to perform a wide range of in silico experiments that would otherwise be too difficult, too expensive or impossible to perform in the laboratory. High-performance computing of the sort that will be possible with the new system is also essential to the success of research and education conducted with sophisticated experimental tools. For example, without the waveforms produced by numerical simulations of black hole collisions and other astrophysical events, gravitational wave signals cannot be extracted from the data produced by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory; high-resolution seismic inversions from the higher density of broadband seismic observations furnished by the EarthScope project are necessary to determine shallow and deep Earth structure; simultaneous integrated computational and experimental testing is conducted on the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation to improve seismic design of buildings and bridges; and advanced computing capabilities will be essential to extracting the signature of the Higgs boson and supersymmetric particles, two of the scientific drivers of the Large Hadron Collider, from the petabytes of data produced in the trillions of particle collisions. This project presents an exciting opportunity to advance the type of research described above by: (i) greatly extending the capacity of high-performance computational resources available to the science and engineering communities, (ii) extending the range of advanced computations that can be handled by providing a system with a very large amount of memory, and a very large amount of processing capability. This system will use an architecture that is similar to that present in many academic institutions and to which many science and engineering applications have been ported. In addition, the system represents an important stepping-stone towards the goal of the use of petascale computing in science and engineering research and education at the end of the decade. It will provide a platform that will allow researchers to experiment with techniques for overcoming one of the hurdles in the path to petascale computing, scaling to very large numbers of processors. This computing system will also provide opportunities to many graduate students and post-docs to gain experience in using high-performance computing systemsThe Texas Advanced Computing Center and its partners will broaden the impact of the computing resource by: teaching in situ and online classes for undergraduate and graduate students in high-performance computing, visualization, data analysis, and grid computing for computational research in science and engineering; partnering with faculty and students at a number of Minority Serving Institutions to provide training in the use of high-performance computing resources; and collaborating with the Girlstart program, a program that supports and enhances the interest of girls in math, science, and technology.