Supercomputing Architecture

At the broadest level, the architecture effort seeks to assure Sandia and the ASC program of continuity in the supply of supercomputers. Given the small size of the US supercomputer industry at the very high end, this often includes leading industry through advances in supercomputing technology. Dating to 15 years ago, Sandia has acquired leading Massively Parallel Processor (MPP) supercomputers of a consistent architecture from nCUBE, Intel, and Cray. Over this period, Sandia has increasingly performed the research and development to keep this architecture current and now has the ability to implement this architecture with minimal dependence on vendors. The architecture effort is currently exploring architectural issues necessary to scale to the 1-100 PFLOPS level.

Areas of Research:

• Advanced Architectures
  • Studies of radiation transport algorithms on advanced computer architectures, such as Processor-In-Memory (PIM), and comparison with existing architectures.
    (Contact: Erik P. DeBenedictis)
  • Collaboration with Caltech on architecture of PIM systems, including FPGA-based simulator.
    (Contacts: Keith D. Underwood, Thomas Sterling - Caltech)
  • Architecture of PIM systems, including applications performance. Collaboration with University of Notre Dame.
    (Contacts: Peter Kogge - Univ. of Notre Dame, Arun Rodriguez - Univ. of Notre Dame, Richard Murphy - Univ. of Notre Dame and Erik P. DeBenedictis)
  • Microarchitecture modeling of supercomputer codes and implications to microarchitecture design. Collaboration with New Mexico State University.
    (Contacts: Jeanine Cook - NMSU and Erik P. DeBenedictis)
  • Studies of fast floating point algorithms using FPGA technology.
    (Contact: Keith D. Underwood)
  • Modeling Advanced Architectures with FPGA technology.
    (Contacts: Keith D. Underwoodand K. Scott Hemmert)
• Algorithm Scalability
  • Studies of the limits of specific numerical methods on parallel computers.
    (Contacts: Erik P. DeBenedictis, Robert E. Benner Jr. and Sue P. Goudy)
  • Research into the suitability of Unified Parallel C (UPC) and High Performance Fortran (HPF) for Sandia codes.
    (Contact: Zhaofang Wen)
• Network Technology
  • Development of fast router technologies and protocols for effectively interfacing common programming methods to networks.
    (Contacts: Keith D. Underwood and Erik P. DeBenedictis)
• Systems Reliability
  • Hardware failure rate of ASC-sized supercomputers.
    (Contact: Erik P. DeBenedictis)
  • Changes in the impact of Cosmic-Ray induced soft errors on ASC-sized supercomputers with semiconductor evolution according to Moore’s Law.
    (Contact: Erik P. DeBenedictis)

Program Contact: Neil D. Pundit

 
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