NCSA NEWS

NCSA, Alliance Bring Their Expertise to SciDAC Program

released October 16, 2001

Contact
Karen Green
NCSA Public Information Officer
kareng@ncsa.uiuc.edu
217.265.0748 phone
217.244.7396 fax

CHAMPAIGN, IL — Researchers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are taking leading roles in a national effort to develop the computing software and hardware needed to use the fastest, most cutting-edge computing systems for scientific research.

Five NCSA staff members are among the principal investigators involved in the Department of Energy's (DOE) Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program. SciDAC is a five year, multimillion-dollar effort aimed at developing hardware and software tools needed to use terascale-level computers to conduct advanced research in basic energy sciences, biological and environmental sciences, high-energy and nuclear physics, and fusion energy sciences.

"Advances in computing technologies have finally made terascale-level computers a reality," said NCSA Director Dan Reed. "But to deliver on the promise of this new level of computing power, we must develop codes that take advantage of these huge increases in performance. We must also realize that computing is now a collaborative activity that uses systems spread over many locations, and we must develop the best tools for collaboration and distributed computing. That's the purpose behind SciDAC, and NCSA and the Alliance have been working on these issues for years."

SciDAC began in Fiscal Year 2001 and involves researchers at universities and government research facilities across the country. A total of 51 awards were distributed for FY2002, including five that involve NCSA researchers. Those awards are:

Scalable Tools for Large Clusters, Resource Management, System Interfaces, System Management Tools Framework. ($15 million)
Rob Pennington, director of NCSA's computing and data management division, will work with researchers from DOE national laboratories to develop software for effective management of terascale-level computational resources. The project, led by Al Geist of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), will create a virtual Scalable Systems Software Center. The center will bring together experts from industry and research to create and support an open source, integrated suite of systems software and tools for terascale computer systems.

Terascale Simulations of Neutrino-Driven Supernovae and Their NucleoSynthesis. ($9.2 million)
Polly Baker, director of the scientific visualization division at NCSA, and Faisal Saied, an NCSA senior research scientist, are among the co-principal investigators on this project that will use complex scientific modeling and visualization techniques to search for the explosion mechanism within core collapse supernovae. The group will develop 3D simulation capabilities for terascale computing systems and new visualization techniques to accurately portray these complicated events. The visualization techniques will be incorporated into a framework that supports visual exploration of large datasets by remote users. ORNL's Anthony Mezzacappa is the lead principal investigator on the project.

Center for Programming Models for Scalable Parallel Computing. ($9.5 million)
Albert Cheng, a project leader at NCSA, and Marianne Winslett, a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will take part in this research effort that involves four national laboratories and seven universities. Rusty Lusk of Argonne National Laboratory is the project's lead investigator. The center will be a virtual facility whose members will develop parallel programming tools for terascale computing systems. Current programming tools do not take full advantage of the performance that is possible with terascale computers. Better programming technologies—including compilers, libraries, communication systems and parallel I/O—will improve the efficiency of codes running on the world's most powerful computers.

National Computational Infrastructure for Lattice Gauge Theory. ($1.86 million)
Reed will take part in this project to simulate quantum chromodynamics (QCD), a theory that describes the strongest force in nature--the force that binds together quarks into protons and neutrons. Celso Mendes, one of Reed's post doctoral researchers in the UI computer science department, is a co-principal investigator and Robert Sugar of the University of California at Santa Barbara is the chief principal invesitigator. The project involves computer scientists and theorists in nuclear and high-energy physics who approximate QCD theory on a space-time lattice (Lattice Gauge Theory). QCD simulations require monumental amounts of computing power, and the research group will work to achieve the best performance possible on terascale computers.

High-End Computer System Performance: Science and Engineering ($10.2 million)
Reed is one of the co-principal investigators for this project involving four national laboratories and four universities. The project will address three fundamental questions of computational science: 1) why there are limits to the performance that can be achieved on high-end computers; 2) how applications can be fined-tuned in order to reach these limits; and 3) how scientists and engineers can use what they learn about performance to improve the development of future applications and computing systems. David Bailey of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory heads the research team.

In addition to the SCiDAC awards to NCSA staff, National Computational Science Alliance partners at Argonne National Laboratory, University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, University of Tennessee, University of Utah, University of Houston, and Rice University received awards for FY2002.

For more on SciDAC, see http://www.science.doe.gov/scidac/.

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a leader in developing and deploying cutting-edge high-performance computing, networking, and information technologies. NCSA is a partner in the TeraGrid project, a National Science Foundation initiative to build and deploy the world's largest, fastest, most comprehensive, distributed infrastructure for open scientific research. NCSA also leads the National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance), a partnership to prototype an advanced computational infrastructure for the 21st century that includes more than 50 academic, government, and industry research partners. The NSF Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program funds the Alliance. In addition to the NSF, NCSA receives support from the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, private sector partners, and other federal agencies. For more information, see http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/.

 

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