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NSF PR 96-65 - October 25, 1996
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Need for Speed: NSF Pursues Petaflop Computers
Kids often race their bicycles, pedaling madly to
move ever faster. Then they advance to sedans, but
covet sports cars, still wanting to push that envelope
of speed.
Computer scientists are no different.
The fastest computers created today are capable of
speeds of about a teraflop--a trillion operations
per second. Already researchers are looking far ahead,
yearning for computers a thousand times faster.
The National Science Foundation, in conjunction with
NASA and DARPA, have funded eight research projects
to creatively approach a petaflop. These pilot projects
will be presented at a workshop this Sunday, Oct.
27, at the Frontiers '96 conference in Annapolis,
Maryland.
To put the speeds in terms that people can understand:
if the speeds of the world's fastest computers just
now being built are like the sailing ships Christopher
Columbus used to cross the Atlantic, space shuttle
speeds are the goal of this research project. Right
now, computer speeds are limited by memory storage
and by how fast that memory can be transferred to
the working parts of the computer. Even with those
issues solved, computers operating at petaflop speeds
must be massively parallel--any application must be
broken into a million pieces, all calculated at once.
To wait to solve problems sequentially slows the computer
down.
"The first petaflop computers are going to be difficult
to use. One of the goals of this project is to see
how friendly can we keep them. You don't want computers
only a few experts can use. The architectures must
support a reasonable programming model without slowing
down," said John Van Rosendale, NSF program manager
leading the project.
But why would anyone need a thousand trillion operations
per second? Any number of applications are already
apparent, from real time nuclear magnetic resonance
imaging during surgery, to computer based drug design,
astrophysical simulation and modeling of environmental
pollution and long term climate changes.
"Until the Internet arrived, we had no real appreciation
of its impact. Petaflop computers may be like that:
we have only a limited sense of the kind of applications
this technology will enable," Van Rosendale said.
The eight Pursuing a Petaflop projects are:
- A Flexible Architecture for Executing Component
Software at 100 Teraflops; Andrew A. Chien
and Rajesh K. Gupta, University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign
- Point Designs for 100 Teraflop Computers Using
PIM Technologies; Peter M. Kogge, Steven C.
Bass, Jay B. Brockman, Danny Z. Chen and Edwin
Hsing-Mean Sha; University of Notre Dame
- Architecture, Algorithms and Applications for
Future Generation Supercomputers; Vipin Kumar
and Ahmed Sameh; University of Minnesota
- Design Studies on Petaflops Special-Purpose
Hardware for Astrophysical Particle Simulations;
Stephen L. W. McMillan, Drexel University;
Piet Hut, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton;
Junichiro Makino, University of Tokyo; Michael
L. Normal, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign;
Frank J. Summers, Princeton University
- Hybrid Technology Multi-Threaded Architecture;
Paul Messina and Thomas Sterling; California
Institute of Technology
- Hierarchical Processors-and-Memory Architecture
for High Performance Computing; Jose A.B.
Fortes and Rudolph Eigenmann, Purdue University;
Valerie Taylor, Northwestern University
- The Illinois Aggressive Cache-Only Memory Architecture
Multiprocessor; Josep Torrellas and David
Padua, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- A Scalable-Feasible Parallel Computer Implementing
Electronic and Optical Interconnections for
156 TeraOPS Minimum Performance; Sotirios
G. Ziavras and Haim Grebel, New Jersey Institute
of Technology; Anthony T. Chronopoulos, Wayne
State University
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