Acquisition of a Cell BE based Cluster for Development and Deployment of Advanced Computational Methods

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The University of New Hampshire (UNH) plans to acquire a high-performance computer from IBM, funded by the National Science Foundation and supplemented by an IBM University Research grant. This machine is powered by 84 PowerXCell 8i processors with a total of 756 computational cores. Beyond substantially increasing UNH's scientific computing capabilities, it provides access to a state-of-the-art accelerator-based architecture, as employed in the world's most advanced supercomputers like Roadrunner at Los Alamos National Laboratory. This research involves grand science challenges in the fields of magnetosphericphysics (space weather), plasma physics, and computational fluid dynamics, lattice quantum chromodynamics and genomics.The investigators on this project conduct research on algorithms and program-ming models for modern hardware architectures. Since computational capabilities have advanced from being driven by enhancements in speed to increasing the number of processors and computational cores, efficient exploitation of highly parallel machines challenges conventional programming models and increases the complexity of algorithms. The researchers plan to develop and deploy new computational approaches for describing, at a higher level of abstraction, the equations to be solved and then uses specific computer software,including source-to-source translation, to generate highly optimized implementations tailored to the hardware to be used. The program also provides first-hand experience using a cutting-edge supercomputer to students in UNH.