9318145 Messina The Grand Challenge Application Groups competition provides one mechanism for the support of multidisciplinary teams of scientists and engineers to meet the goals of the High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) Initiative in Fiscal Year 1993. The ideal proposal provided not only the opportunity to achieve significant progress on (1) a fundamental problem in science or engineering whose solution could be advanced by applying high performance computing techniques and resources, (2) enabling technologies which facilitate those advances, but also significant interactions between scientific and computational activities, usually involving mathematical, computer or computational scientist, that would have impact in high performance computational activities beyond the specific scientific or engineering problem areas(s) or discipline being studied. This multi-disciplinary project will investigate and develop strategies for efficient implementation of I/O intensive applications in computational science and engineering. Scalable parallel I/O approaches will be pursued by a team of computer scientist and applications scientists who will work together to: * Characterize the I/O behavior of specific application programs running on large massively parallel computers * Abstract and define I/O models (templates) * Implement and test application-level I/O tools on large-scale computations The Pablo performance analysis environment will provide the foundation for the performance instrumentation and analysis. The application programs are already fully operational on advanced architecture systems and their authors are all co-investigators in this project. The principal computers used will be the Intel Touchstone Delta and Paragon systems at Caltech, each with over 500 computational nodes. Five application areas will be included: fluid dynamics, chemistry, astronomy, neuroscience, and modelling of m aterials-processing plasmas. The parallel programs for these applications cover a range of I/O patterns and volume, and the techniques that will be developed in this project will be of relevance to a broad spectrum of engineering and science applications. In addition, by overcoming their current I/O limitations, the specific applications targeted in this award will achieve significant new science and engineering results. By the end of the project, sustained teraFlops computers will become available. The project will devise and implement general methods for scalable I/O using today's advanced computers, immediately apply those methods to carry out unprecedented applications in several fields, and use the methods and experience gained in the first half of the project to tackle the I/O issues in future sustained teraFlops computers. This project will be carried out by a team of researchers who have many years of experience in using parallel computers for large-scale applications, in measuring and characterizing the behavior of applications on such computers, and in creating methods and tools that facilitate the use of such systems. Building on this considerable experience, the project will concentrate initially on exploring the I/O behavior of existing applications and on devising ways to get adequate and scalable I/O performance. The five application areas included in this award cover a wide range of I/O needs and behavior, including the use of out-of-core methods, reading data from high-speed instruments, interactive and irregular data flows in modelling, and pipelining of data from distributed computing resources on high-speed networks. A key part of the approach is an integration effort that will concentrate on ensuring close communication and synergy among the components of the project and on integrating the results. The primary objective of the project is to develop methods and insights that are as generally applicable as possible. This award is being suppo rted by the Advanced Projects Research Agency as well as NSF programs in engineering and computer science.
