Lead Proposal: CNS 0551688 PI: Sass, Ronald Institution: University of Kansas Center for Research Inc
Collaborative Proposal: CNS 0551678 PI: Chatha, Karamvir Institution : Arizona State University
Researchers at the University of Kansas, Arizona State University and Clemson University will acquire a 64-node experimental Reconfigurable Computing Cluster to support on-going research projects investigating High-Performance Computing. They will use off-the-shelf components including field programmable gate arrays (FPGA's) and an inexpensive custom network adapter to enable new research that is a natural out-growth of established research programs. The experimental cluster will enable the researchers to conduct their research projects and to evaluate two novel aspects of the proposed architecture: (a) using the FPGAs as the primary processor on the node, and (b) integrating the network switching components into the configurable resources of the FPGA. If successful, this approach could lead to significant advances in high performance computing. Projects supported will include: network scalability to assess how the number of nodes and distance between nodes affects performance; assessing use of these FPGA based clusters for common applications such as computation fluid dynamics; and use of these models for RC-BLAST, an important bio-informatics application. The investigators will develop undergraduate research projects using these resources.
