Advanced Architectures             Event Type Start Time End Time Rm # Chair     Paper 10:30AM 11:00AM 36-37 Jose Munoz (DOE/NNSA)   Title: Merrimac: Supercomputing with Streams   Speakers/Presenter: William J. Dally (Stanford University), Patrick Hanrahan (Stanford University), Mattan Erez (Stanford University), Timothy J. Knight (Stanford University), Francois Labonte (Stanford University), Jung-Ho Ahn (Stanford University), Nuwan Jayasena (Stanford University), Ujval J. Kapasi (Stanford University), Abhishek Das (Stanford University), Jayanth Gummaraju (Stanford University), Ian Buck (Stanford University)   Paper 11:00AM 11:30AM 36-37 Jose Munoz (DOE/NNSA)   Title: Protein Explorer: A Petaflops Special-Purpose Computer System for Molecular Dynamics Simulations   Speakers/Presenter: Makoto Taiji (RIKEN), Tetsu Narumi (RIKEN), Yousuke Ohno (RIKEN), Noriyuki Futatsugi (RIKEN), Atsushi Suenaga (RIKEN), Naoki Takada (RIKEN), Akihiko Konagaya (RIKEN)   Paper 11:30AM 12:00PM 36-37 Jose Munoz (DOE/NNSA)   Title: Early Experience with Scientific Programs on the Cray MTA-2   Speakers/Presenter: Wendell Anderson (Naval Research Laboratory), Preston Briggs (Cray, Inc.), C. Stephen Hellberg (Naval Research Laboratory), Daryl W. Hess (Naval Research Laboratory), Alexei Khokhlov (University of Chicago), Marco Lanzagorta (Scientific and Engineering Solutions), Robert Rosenberg (Naval Research Laboratory)

Session: Advanced Architectures   Title: Merrimac: Supercomputing with Streams   Chair: Jose Munoz (DOE/NNSA)   Time: Thursday, November 20, 10:30AM - 11:00AM   Rm #: 36-37   Speaker(s)/Author(s):     William J. Dally (Stanford University), Patrick Hanrahan (Stanford University), Mattan Erez (Stanford University), Timothy J. Knight (Stanford University), Francois Labonte (Stanford University), Jung-Ho Ahn (Stanford University), Nuwan Jayasena (Stanford University), Ujval J. Kapasi (Stanford University), Abhishek Das (Stanford University), Jayanth Gummaraju (Stanford University), Ian Buck (Stanford University)       Description:   Merrimac uses stream architecture and advanced interconnection networks to give an order of magnitude more performance per unit cost than cluster-based scientific computers built from the same technology. Organizing the computation into streams and exploiting the resulting locality using a register hierarchy enables a stream architecture to reduce the memory bandwidth required by representative applications by an order of magnitude or more. Hence a processing node with a fixed bandwidth (expensive) can support an order of magnitude more arithmetic units (inexpensive). This in turn allows a given level of performance to be achieved with fewer nodes (a 1-PFLOPs machine, for example, with just 8,192 nodes) resulting in greater reliability, and simpler system management. We sketch the design of Merrimac, a streaming scientific computer that can be scaled from a $20K 2 TFLOPS workstation to a $20M 2PFLOPS supercomputer and present the results of some initial application experiments on this architecture. This paper has been nominated for the Best Paper of SC2003 award.   Link: Download PDF

Session: Advanced Architectures   Title: Protein Explorer: A Petaflops Special-Purpose Computer System for Molecular Dynamics Simulations   Chair: Jose Munoz (DOE/NNSA)   Time: Thursday, November 20, 11:00AM - 11:30AM   Rm #: 36-37   Speaker(s)/Author(s):     Makoto Taiji (RIKEN), Tetsu Narumi (RIKEN), Yousuke Ohno (RIKEN), Noriyuki Futatsugi (RIKEN), Atsushi Suenaga (RIKEN), Naoki Takada (RIKEN), Akihiko Konagaya (RIKEN)       Description:   We are developing the `Protein Explorer' system, a petaflops special-purpose computer system for molecular dynamics simulations. The Protein Explorer is a PC cluster equipped with special-purpose engines that calculate nonbonded interactions between atoms, which is the most time-consuming part of the simulations. A dedicated LSI `MDGRAPE-3 chip' performs these force calculations at a speed of 165 gigaflops or higher. The system will have 6,144 MDGRAPE-3 chips to achieve a nominal peak performance of one petaflop. The system will be completed in 2006. In this paper, we describe the project plans and the architecture of the Protein Explorer.   Link: Download PDF

Session: Advanced Architectures   Title: Early Experience with Scientific Programs on the Cray MTA-2   Chair: Jose Munoz (DOE/NNSA)   Time: Thursday, November 20, 11:30AM - 12:00PM   Rm #: 36-37   Speaker(s)/Author(s):     Wendell Anderson (Naval Research Laboratory), Preston Briggs (Cray, Inc.), C. Stephen Hellberg (Naval Research Laboratory), Daryl W. Hess (Naval Research Laboratory), Alexei Khokhlov (University of Chicago), Marco Lanzagorta (Scientific and Engineering Solutions), Robert Rosenberg (Naval Research Laboratory)       Description:   We describe our experiences porting and tuning three scientific programs to the Cray MTA-2, paying particular attention to the problems posed by I/O. We have measured the performance of each program over many different machine configurations and we report on the scalability of each program. In addition, we compare the performance of the MTA with that of an SGI Origin running all three programs.   Link: Download PDF