II-New: System Acquisition for the Development of Scalable Parallel Algorithms for Scientific Computing

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Parallel computing now plays a central role in nearly every science and engineering endeavor. The leading supercomputers today comprise hundreds of thousands of processors, and in the near future are expected to comprise millions of processors. Researchers at the University of Delaware are working to harness this vast computing power to make ground-breaking scientific discoveries. This work requires fundamental algorithmic research and development to address issues such as multiscale coupling, scalability, and hybrid message-passing/threaded programming.The investigators are building a new, highly parallel, computing system for scientific computation research and teaching at the University of Delaware. This computer consists of approximately 1,600 processors, and is expandable to many more. UD researchers who share a common interest in scalable parallel computation plan to explore a variety of scientific applications: 3D Navier-Stokes solvers for environmental turbulent flows; "ensemble analysis" in oceanic forecasting; computational electromagnetism; simulation of emulsion microstructure for environmental pollution control and material synthesis; electronic structure calculations for atoms and molecules; multiscale cloud dynamics for more reliable weather and climate prediction; computational carbon nanoelectronics; and vorticity-dominated flows. The new computer will be used to optimize the current algorithms in each application, help identify limitations to scalability, and explore new ideas to enable scaling to hundreds of thousands of processors and to take advantage of hybrid architectures. The system motivates collaboration among faculty interested in application problems and faculty with expertise in computer science. Libraries for efficient parallel data redistribution and automatic optimization of parallel codes are some of the ways the computer scientists participating in the project are enhancing the scientific applications.