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

获取基于 Cell BE 的集群，用于开发和部署高级计算方法

• 批准号: 0855145
• 负责人: Kai Germaschewski
• 金额: $ 45万
• 依托单位: University of New Hampshire
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2009
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2009-09-01 至 2012-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0855145&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Acquisition; Cell; based; Cluster; Development

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.

新罕布什尔大学（UND）计划从IBM那里获取一台由国家科学基金会资助的IBM高性能计算机，并补充了IBM University Research Grant。该机器由84个PowerXCell 8i处理器提供动力，总计756个计算核心。除了大大提高UNH的科学计算能力外，它还提供了对最先进的基于加速器的建筑的访问，这是世界上最先进的超级计算机（如Los Alamos National Laboratory）所采用的。这项研究涉及磁层物理（太空天气），等离子体物理学以及计算流体动力学，晶格量子染色体动力学和基因组学领域的宏伟科学挑战。该项目的研究人员对现代硬件建筑的算法和程序处理模型进行了研究。由于计算能力从速度的提高驱动到增加了处理器和计算核心的数量，因此对高度平行机器的有效利用会挑战常规编程模型并增加算法的复杂性。研究人员计划开发和部署新的计算方法，以在更高的抽象中描述要解决的方程式，然后使用特定的计算机软件，包括源代码转换，以生成针对要使用的硬件量身定制的高度优化实现。该计划还为UNH的学生提供了使用尖端超级计算机的第一手经验。