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Creating Science-Driven Computer Architecture: The "Blue Planet" ProposalTwice the sustained capability of the Earth Simulator at half the costIn recent years scientific computing in America has been handicapped by its dependence on hardware that is designed and optimized for commercial applications. The performance of the recently completed Earth Simulator in Japan, which is five times faster than the fastest American supercomputer, dramatically exposed the seriousness of this problem. Typical scientific applications are now able to extract only 5 to 10 percent of the power of American supercomputers built from commercial web and data servers. By contrast, the design of the Earth Simulator makes 30 to 50 percent of its power accessible to the majority of types of scientific calculations. The Ultrascale Simulation for Science website provides information about the challenge posed by the Earth Simulator and the emerging U.S. response to that challenge. Lawrence Berkeley and Argonne national laboratories, in close collaboration with IBM, have responded to the challenge with a proposal for a new program to bring into existence a new class of computational capability in the United States that is optimal for science. Our strategic proposal, "Creating Science-Driven Computer Architecture: A New Path to Scientific Leadership," envisions a new type of development partnership with computer vendors that goes beyond the mere evaluation of the offerings that those vendors are currently planning for the next decade. This comprehensive strategy includes development partnerships with multiple vendors, in which teams of scientific applications specialists and computer scientists will work with computer architects from major U.S. vendors to create hardware and software environments that will allow scientists to extract the maximum performance and capability from the hardware.
The cost of scientific supercomputing is also an issue of national strategic importance. The strategy we propose to implement will pursue at least three options:
Option 2 will provide twice the sustained capability of the Earth Simulator at half the cost. Option 3 will provide a new architecture family for scientific computing and one that makes a definitive step towards cost-effective petaflop/s computers with high sustained levels of performance. In response to the High End Computing Revitalization Task Force (HECRTF) Outreach, the Berkeley Lab-Argonne proposal was rewritten in May 2003 with the participation of Lawrence Livermore, Oak Ridge, Pacific Northwest, Sandia, and Los Alamos national laboratories. The revised version of "Creating Science-Driven Computer Architecture" and HECRTF white papers can be found here. |
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