NASA Ames Research Center powers up first 512-processor single system image SGI Origin 3800Mountain View 30 March 2001 The NASA Ames Research Center, in Moffett Field powered up a 512-processor SGI Origin 3800. Working under a memorandum of agreement, NASA Ames and SGI have been cooperating in order to push the boundaries of high-performance computing. It was NASA Ames computer scientists who first encouraged SGI to connect many computer processor chips in a new way when building its 512-processor supercomputers.
The 512-processor SGI Origin 3800 system at NASA Ames, which is able to
calculate airflow around an aircraft in a day , will lead to
faster and better development of spacecraft, according to John Ziebarth, deputy
chief of the Numerical Aerospace Simulation (NAS) Division, NASA Ames.
"We suggested that SGI wire its supercomputers to make each of the hundreds of
CPUs see each byte of RAM as the same image, so each change made to the memory
is seen by all 512 CPUs at once," explained Bob Ciotti, NASA Ames computer
scientist.
NASA Ames also contributed other innovations that helped make the 512-processor
SGI Origin 3800 supercomputer possible. For instance, NASA Ames researcher Jim
Taft invented a technique called shared-memory multilevel parallelism that
greatly simplifies authoring software for parallel-processor supercomputers by
enabling easy communications across many CPUs.
To make the prototype 512-processor SGI Origin 3800 single system image, NASA
Ames and SGI combined two 256-processor SGI Origin 3800 machines. Over the next
few months, NASA Ames and SGI will be connecting two 512-processor SGI Origin 3800 supercomputers to form
the world's first 1,024-processor single system image.
"According to our projections, the 1,024-processor machine could deliver about
twice the performance of the 512-processor machine," said Bill Feiereisen, NAS
chief, NASA Ames.
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