This research instrumentation enables research projects in: - Parallel Applications and Programming Environments for Computational Cosmology on Cache-Coherent DSM Architectures, - Parallel Applications and Programming Environments for Computational Protein Structure Determination on Cache-Coherent DSM Architectures, and - Parallel Workload for System Evaluation and their Implications for Software and Hardware. To support integrated application-driven research in the aforementioned projects, this award contributes to the purchase of an upgrade to an existing 64-processor SGI Origin2000 multiprocessor by the Departments of Computer Science and Astrophysics together with the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory at Princeton University. The equipment will be used to continue and enhance the research projects listed and to support new projects between computer science and the Plasma Physics Laboratory. The first project, a collaboration between Computer Science and Astrophysics, deals with problems particularly challenging for parallel implementation due to the combination of interacting models and a highly irregular dynamic nature. The goals are to develop parallel algorithms and implementations for a range of computations, to develop generalizable and portable techniques preserving locality while providing load balance, to extend existing parallel languages; use runtime systems of these languages, to build libraries of partitioning techniques and algorithms. The second project, a collaboration between CS and the School of Medicine at Stanford University, with similar goals, simulates inherently slow processes in structural biology. The last project will broaden the set of workloads available. The SPLASH suites of parallel applications in critical emerging application areas serve as benchmarks for architectural studies, as well as testbeds for programming languages and compilers.
