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

新汉普郡大学(UNH)计划从IBM购买一台高性能计算机，由国家科学基金会提供资金，并得到IBM大学研究拨款的补充。这台机器由84个PowerXCell 8i处理器驱动，总共有756个计算核心。除了显著提高UNH的科学计算能力外，它还提供了访问最先进的基于加速器的体系结构的途径，该体系结构用于世界上最先进的超级计算机，如洛斯阿拉莫斯国家实验室的Roadrunner。这项研究涉及磁层物理(空间气象)、等离子体物理、计算流体力学、晶格量子色动力学和基因组学等领域的重大科学挑战。该项目的研究人员对现代硬件体系结构的算法和编程模型进行了研究。由于计算能力已经从速度的提高推动到处理器和计算核心数量的增加，高效地利用高度并行的机器挑战了传统的编程模型，并增加了算法的复杂性。研究人员计划开发和部署新的计算方法，以在更高的抽象水平上描述要求解的方程，然后使用特定的计算机软件，包括源到源翻译，以生成针对要使用的硬件而量身定做的高度优化的实现。该计划还为北卡罗来纳大学的学生提供使用尖端超级计算机的第一手体验。

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.