Cyberinfrastructure for Accelerating Physics & Astronomy Applications With Many-core and Accelerator-Based Systems

来自物理和天文学模拟、观测、实验和分析的数据速率和数据量(Peta运算/秒，15PB/年)的快速增长正在达到关键的计算僵局。为了满足从千万亿级到亿级级计算挑战的需求，必须从根本上研究和开发新的节能超级计算体系结构和解决方案。这项工作的独特之处在于采用了科学/应用驱动的方法，预先确定了关键的应用驱动因素，以评估这一新方法的效果。我们将利用新兴的以图形处理器(GPU)为重点的多核体系结构，构建一个全面的软件库、工具、框架、易于组装的通用硬件模块和完整的交钥匙解决方案的网络基础设施，具有广泛的吸引力。这项为期三年的研究计划将为直接适用于广泛的计算密集型科学问题的高效可扩展解决方案开发算法和硬件基础设施。这套应用程序被分为三个不同的领域--模拟、仪器和数据处理--涵盖宇宙学、天文学、光学和图像/数据处理方面的具体实际挑战，具有跨学科的潜力。已开发的网络基础设施将以便于实施的方法向更广泛的科学界发布。通过规划中的网络基础设施，成功利用并行架构(如GPU)处理计算密集型科学问题的能力，将为新的发现打开大门，并使科学的发展发生革命性的变化。基础设施将积极识别跨学科加速重叠，并将减少采用。超高速的大规模模拟将把总体执行时间减少几个数量级，从而将每月容易出现故障和延迟的时间周期减少到几小时和几分钟。远程现场处理高数据速率将首次使射电天文学的实时成像成为可能。与中国国家天文台和德国海德堡大学的国际集团建立了合作伙伴关系。拟议的研究将使学生参与并使之成为可能。低成本设备和网络基础设施的结合将为年轻的研究人员和学生提供负担得起的高性能计算。基础设施将以每年的周期向更广泛的社区发布，开放源码许可证穿插在研讨会上，以扩大研究范围。

The rapid increase of data rates and volumes (peta-operations/second, 15 petabytes/year) from physics and astronomy simulations, observations, experiments and analyses are reaching critical computational impasse. To meet the demands of petascale to exascale computing challenges, fundamentally new energy efficient supercomputing architectures and solutions will have to be researched and developed. The uniqueness of this work is in adopting science/application-driven approach where the key application-drivers are identified up-front to assess the efficacy of this new approach. With wide appeal, the new period of energy efficient science with new performance metrics such as operations-per-watt presents a great opportunity to lead the progress of scientific research.We will build a cyberinfrastructure of comprehensive software libraries, tools, frameworks, easy-assembly common hardware modules and complete turnkey solutions by leveraging emerging many-core architectures with emphasis on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). The three-year research plan will develop algorithms, and hardware infrastructures for efficient scalable solutions directly applicable to a broad range of compute-intensive scientific problems. The set of applications are categorized into three separate domains - simulation, instrumentation and data processing - covering specific real-case challenges in cosmology, astronomy, optics, and image/data processing with potential of interdisciplinary relevance. The developed cyberinfrastructure will be released to the broader scientific community with methodologies for easy implementation. Successfully harnessing the power of the parallel architectures such as GPUs for compute-intensive scientific problems via the planned cyberinfrastructure will open doors for new discovery and revolutionize the growth of science. The infrastructure will actively identify interdisciplinary acceleration overlaps and will alleviate adoption. Extremely high-speed massive simulations will cut the overall execution times by several orders of magnitudes, thereby reducing monthly time cycles, prone to malfunctions and delays, to hours and minutes. Remote on-site handling of high data rates will make real-time imaging in radio astronomy possible for the first time. Partnerships have been established with international groups in National Astronomical Observatories of China, and University of Heidelberg, Germany. The proposed research will engage and enable students. The combination of low cost devices and cyberinfrastructure will supply affordable high performance computing for young researchers and students. The infrastructure will be released to the broader community in yearly cycles with open source license punctuated with workshops to widen the scope of the research.