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Table of Contents - June 21 1997
Supercomputer Seminar in Mannheim
Industry news
- Internet has taken over from HPC as "hot technology"
-
Ad Emmen
- Internet is hot. It is getting all the attention, and even more: there are no start-up companies in high-performance computing (HPC) in the US anymore. HPC does not attract venture capital and there are no new federal megaprograms. Bright graduates all go to Internet and not HPC. The US supercomputing world has to live with that. The same holds for Europe which also has to adapt. Horst Simon, director of the energy supercomputing center NERSC told this to an audience of supercomputer specialists a nd managers at the Mannheim Supercomputer Conference.
- Internet is hot. It is getting all the attention, and even more: there are no start-up companies in high-performance computing (HPC) in the US anymore. HPC does not attract venture capital and there are no new federal megaprograms. Bright graduates all go to Internet and not HPC. The US supercomputing world has to live with that. The same holds for Europe which also has to adapt. Horst Simon, director of the energy supercomputing center NERSC told this to an audience of supercomputer specialists a nd managers at the Mannheim Supercomputer Conference.
- Putting everything in just a few large HPCN centres?
-
Ad Emmen
- In Germany a small number (2-4) of world class large supercomputer centres with each several large TOP500 class machines, dominate the HPCN scene. Is this the way to go or should the money available for HPCN be distributed over more centres or put into competence creation? This was one of the main topics at the Forum discussion at the Mannheim Supercomputer Seminar.
HPCN Industry
- Exemplar architectural concept - to be adopted by all major vendors
-
Ad Emmen
- According to Dr. Frank Baetke, European manager high-performance computing at Hewlett-Packard, the three major HPC-manufacturers now all have adopted the SMP/NUMA based architecture, first employed in 1994 in HP's Exemplar (at that time introduced as the Convex SPP1xxx series). He also commented on the sale to Liechtenstein, which brings this small country on top of the list in terms of 'supercomputer-density'.
Industrial applications
- TURBOMOLE speeds up quantum chemistry computations on Karlsruhe 256 processor SP2
-
Uwe Harms
- TURBOMOLE is a program package for quantum mechanical ab initio computations of the electronical structure of molecules. This program (about 500,000 lines of code, mostly Fortran) was developed for RISC workstations. It was optimised for cache structures and register reuse. At the Mannheim Supercomputer Seminar, Professor Reinhard Ahlrichs, Theoretical Chemistry University Karlsruhe, ported it to parallel machines like the new 256 node IBM RS6000/SP in Karlsruhe. Porting does not imply parallelisation of the programme: Ahlrichs does not want to repeat the job every 3 years.
- TURBOMOLE is a program package for quantum mechanical ab initio computations of the electronical structure of molecules. This program (about 500,000 lines of code, mostly Fortran) was developed for RISC workstations. It was optimised for cache structures and register reuse. At the Mannheim Supercomputer Seminar, Professor Reinhard Ahlrichs, Theoretical Chemistry University Karlsruhe, ported it to parallel machines like the new 256 node IBM RS6000/SP in Karlsruhe. Porting does not imply parallelisation of the programme: Ahlrichs does not want to repeat the job every 3 years.
- Computational fluid dynamics simulations sometimes beat experiments
-
Ad Emmen
- Numerical simulations of unsteady flows in for instance a tube or around an airplane, are problems that require huge amounts of computing time. Egon Krause from RWTH Aachen, explained this at the Mannheim Supercomputer conference. In one simulation, unexpected eddies popped up, that where later confirmed by experiments. Krause uses a large SNI-VPP30 supercomputer for his simulations.
- Numerical simulations of unsteady flows in for instance a tube or around an airplane, are problems that require huge amounts of computing time. Egon Krause from RWTH Aachen, explained this at the Mannheim Supercomputer conference. In one simulation, unexpected eddies popped up, that where later confirmed by experiments. Krause uses a large SNI-VPP30 supercomputer for his simulations.
- High-performance computers simulate combustion and heat transfer in power stations
-
Uwe Harms
- The layout and optimisation of super power stations based on utility boilers moves from empirical and experimental to simulation-based methods. Industrial acceptance depends on a short turn-around time of the simulations. Uwe Schnell from the University of Stuttgart discussed at the Mannheim Supercomputer Seminar the parallelisation experiences of AIOLOS, a combustion chamber simulation program for utility boilers, that is based on finite volumes. Schnell uses loop-parallelisation with microtasking on the NEC SX-4. A problem with 50 transport equations and a discretization with up to 1,000,000 grid cells was demonstrated.
- The layout and optimisation of super power stations based on utility boilers moves from empirical and experimental to simulation-based methods. Industrial acceptance depends on a short turn-around time of the simulations. Uwe Schnell from the University of Stuttgart discussed at the Mannheim Supercomputer Seminar the parallelisation experiences of AIOLOS, a combustion chamber simulation program for utility boilers, that is based on finite volumes. Schnell uses loop-parallelisation with microtasking on the NEC SX-4. A problem with 50 transport equations and a discretization with up to 1,000,000 grid cells was demonstrated.
- Getting into colliding black holes and neutron stars
-
Uwe Harms
- Eighty years ago, Einstein developed the theory of general relativity. Now the largest parallel supercomputers are approaching the speed and memory requirements to solve the complete set of Einstein's equations. Simulation of full 3D simulations of events like colliding black holes and neutron stars are within reach. Ed Seidel, Max-Planck Institute for gravitational physics at Potsdam, Germany reported at the Mannheim Supercomputer Seminar. Parallelization strategies and performance issues on various machines, including SGI/Cray Origin 2000, Cray T3D/E and C-90, Convex Exemplar, IBM SP-2, and Thinking Machines CM-5 show the progress made thusfar.
Atlantic news
- NCSA and the PACI Programme - ten more years of HPC in the USA
-
Ad Emmen
- The PACI Programme Consortium, managed by NCSA, is one of the two consortia funded by the NSF for the next ten years. John Towns, Associate Diretor at NCSA Illinois, explained the status of the project, three months after the NSF desicion, at the Mannheim Supercomputer Seminar.
- The road from Gigaflop/s to Petaflop/s
-
Uwe Harms
- Paul Messina from CalTech presented approaches, investigations and possibilities to reach Petaflop/s performance at the Mannheim Supercomputer Seminar. There are applications that need this enormous amount of computing power: 1,000 times faster than the current fastest machines. Messina talked about studies that propose and examine innovative approaches to achieve this performance in the year 2007 time frame. The latest machine at the CalTech computing centre, a 256 processor Exemplar has been installed this month. Messina gave details on this machine.
- Paul Messina from CalTech presented approaches, investigations and possibilities to reach Petaflop/s performance at the Mannheim Supercomputer Seminar. There are applications that need this enormous amount of computing power: 1,000 times faster than the current fastest machines. Messina talked about studies that propose and examine innovative approaches to achieve this performance in the year 2007 time frame. The latest machine at the CalTech computing centre, a 256 processor Exemplar has been installed this month. Messina gave details on this machine.
Regional news
Germany
- Hypercomputing and supercomputing in Germany
-
Uwe Harms
- In Germany there are several distributed computing projects underway. Two different appproaches are hypercomputing with workstations while they are not in use by their owner, and metacomputing with dedicated large supercomputers. Hypercomputing, a concept for a network-based computer architecture, was presented at the Mannheim Supercomputer seminar by Professor Djamshid Tavangarian, University of Rostock. Metacomputing by Dr. Alexander Reinefeld from the Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing.
- In Germany there are several distributed computing projects underway. Two different appproaches are hypercomputing with workstations while they are not in use by their owner, and metacomputing with dedicated large supercomputers. Hypercomputing, a concept for a network-based computer architecture, was presented at the Mannheim Supercomputer seminar by Professor Djamshid Tavangarian, University of Rostock. Metacomputing by Dr. Alexander Reinefeld from the Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing.