Proposal #: CNS 07-09140 07-08307 07-08820 PI(s): Brockman, Jay B. Bader, David A. Gao, Guang R. Barabasi,Albert-Laszlo;Chawla,Nitesh;Kogge,PeterM. Vetter, Jeffrey S. Institution: University of Notre Dame Georgia Institute Tech U.Delaware Notre Dame, IN 46556-5602 Atlanta, GA 30332-0002 Newark, DE 19716-1551 Proposal #: CNS 07-09385 07-09111 07-09254 PI(s): Gilbert, John R. Upchurch, Edwin T. Yelick, Katherine A. Wolski, Richard. Institution: UC-Santa Barbara California Inst Tech UC-Berkeley Santa Barbara, CA 93106-2050 Pasadena, CA 91125-0600 Berkeley, CA 94704-5940 Title: Colla Rsch:IAD:Dev Rsch Infr. for Multithreaded Computing Community Using Cray Eldorado Platform
Project Proposed:
This collaborative project, developing a shared infrastructure needed to broaden its impact for developing software to run on the next generation of computer hardware, brings a diverse group of researchers from six universities in a joint effort. The work responds to the trend towards multicore processors where developers envision placing tens to hundreds of cores on a single die, each running multiple threads (in contrast to the currently dominant message-passing architectures resulting from the advent of MPI and Linux clusters). Three objectives are proposed: . Acquiring computer hardware as a shared community resource capable of efficiently running, in experimental and production modes, complex programs with thousands of threads in shared memory; . Assembling software infrastructure for developing and measuring performance of programs running on the hardware; and . Building stronger ties between the people themselves, creating ways for researchers at the partner institutions to collaborate and communicate their findings to the broader community. The Cray XMT system, scheduled for delivery in 2007 serves as an ideal platform. The second bullet includes algorithms, data sets, libraries, languages, tools, and simulators to evaluate performance of program running on the hardware focusing on applications that benefit from large numbers of threats, massively data intensive, ""sparse-graph"" problems that are difficult to parallelize using conventional message-passing on clusters. Each university contributes a piece to the infrastructure, using it for support of projects. Sandia National Laboratories has agreed to host the system and provide supplementary funding. Each university will use the Cray XMT system in courses.
Broader Impacts: The infrastructure measures performance providing a basis for the community to improve sharin, and build strong ties for collaboration and communication. Courses will be created and materials will be made available. Workshops for dissemination of the findings are also planned.
This project has enormous potential for contributions in the solution by computer of emerging problems in social networks, cybersecurity and finding information in extreme scale databases. Current computer architectures do not do these so called 'Big Data' problems well. As our online society grows it is faced with exponentially increasing 'Big Data' problems - example Facebook with 600 million users/day and growing. We don't know yet exactly how machines can help us discover new knowledge out of the potential relationships developing among online entities. But what we do know is that current mainstream computer architecture is not up to these problems. The Cray XMT is a novel architecture targeted to solving these social database problems efficiently by speeding up what is called NORA (non-obvious relationships analysis) problems. While the XMT is the first of its kind, and may not emerge as the solution itself, it is a pioneering effort that is on the evolutionary path to systems that will solve these problems. No one can accurately estimate the benefit to human society, education, research that solution of these 'Big Data' will bring. We believe the benefit will be at least as great as the advent of computers in the 1940's perhaps as great a benefit as invention of the printing press around 1440 as we become able to make sense out of the availability of huge amounts of digital data. This project purchased and made available a Cray XMT sited at Sandia National Labs for student and staff experimentation. Caltech's role in the project was three fold: (1) to facilitate and manage productive user access to the XMT. Caltech had available unique expertise in pioneering use of the pre-cursors of the XMT the MTA-1 and MTA-2 machines; (2) Caltech's Center for Advanced Computing Research applied its expertise in compute intense and memory intense parallel applications codes to run actual programs on the XMT to test its capability; (3) the XMT architecture was evangelized to budding young chemistry, biology, bioengineering, astrophysics, applied physics, applied math, computer science students and rsearchers via an experimental multi-disciplinary (astrophysics & biology) class on advanced computer applications which included the unique Cray XMT architecture.
