In this effort research and education at the boundary of parallel systems and applications will be performed. It is motivated by the need for application insights to make fundamental advances in parallel systems, and the recent convergence in multiprocessor architectures to general purpose nodes connected by a communication architecture. On the research side, challenging, irregular, dynamic applications will be parallelized on real systems in close collaboration with domain researchers, particularly in probabilistic protein structure determination and adaptive unstructured meshing, and their implications for parallel architecture and software understood. General techniques for partitioning such complex applications will be developed, particularly for the emerging class of cache- coherent distributed-memory multiprocessors. The applications will be distributed as benchmarks to the parallel computing community. Architectural implications, particularly communication demands, scaling and resource distribution, will be examined, and scaling methodologies developed. Funds permitting, a range of commercial systems will be evaluated using applications, to understand the impact of their communication architectures and tradeoffs, and insights into programming and performance debugging environments studied. On the education side, a new undergraduate course in parallel architecture will be developed, and a textbook on parallel architecture is being written to articulate the convergence and develop parallel architecture as an engineering rather than exotic discipline.
