9617541 Farrell, Paul A Ruttan, Arden G Kent State University CISE Research Instrumentation: A High Performance Network for Distributed Computation and Visualization The instrumentation grant enables the purchase of a high bandwidth, low latency Fibre Channel network connecting high performance to be used in the following research projects: - Path Following, Visualization and Steering of Liquid Crystal Calculations - Distributed Operating Systems Research - Large Scalable Parallel Quantum Monte Carlo The equipment will support several research projects, involving work in distributed large scale scientific computation, computational steering and visualization, together with work on distributed operating systems. In addition to the research projects themselves, it is planned to compare the effectiveness of the algorithms and methods on Fibre Channel to that on an ATM network. The project on path following, visualization and steering of liquid crystal calculations involves the development of efficient algorithms to solve large scale liquid crystal problems in a distributed network environment and the tools to visualize and steer the resulting calculations. The project on large scalable parallel quantum Monte Carlo methods involves investigation of communication and load balancing in highly scalable implementations of electronic structure calculations. The algorithms and performance will be compared on high-bandwidth networks and parallel machines. The project on distributed operating systems is designed to enable the effective use of ensembles of workstations. This involves microkernel-based operating systems for networks of heterogeneous machines and heterogeneous distributed scheduling systems for WANs and LANs.
