Impact of Advances in Computing and Communications Technologies on Chemical Science and Technology Report of a Workshop (1999) / Chapter Skim
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1 The Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative
1 The Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative
Pages 8-19
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From page 8... ...
established the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) in 1996.~ The goal of ASCI is to simulate the results of new weapons designs as well as the effects of aging on existing and new designs, all in the absence of additional data from underground nuclear tests.
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From page 9... ...
The Challenges The Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative is an applications-driven effort with a goal to develop reliable computational models of the physical and chemical processes involved in the design, manufacture, and degradation of nuclear weapons. Based on detailed discussions with scientists and engineers with expertise in weapons design, manufacturing, and aging and in computational physics and chemistry, a goal of simulating full-system, three-dimensional nuclear burn and safety simulation processes by the year 2004 was established.
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From page 10... ...
This machine has been used for a number of breakthrough simulations and has been invaluable for the scientific and engineering application teams in their efforts to develop simulation software that scales to large numbers of processors. The nodes on the two so-called Blue systems, Blue Mountain at Los Alamos (SGI/Cray)
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From page 11... ...
It is one thing to get a few computational kernels running on a parallel computer and another thing to get the massive codes used to simulate physical and chemical systems running efficiently on the complex ASCI machines. As an example of the applications now possible on the ASCI machines, a three-dimensional calculation used the ARES code to simulate Rayleigh-Taylor turbulent mixing and hydrodynamic instabilities found in supernovae and contained over 35 million zones and used 1,920 processors on the 3Moore's law, actually a "rule of thumb," states that the computing power of microprocessors doubles every 18 months or so.
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From page 12... ...
PathForward draws on the capabilities, availability, expertise, and products currently being produced by leading computer companies, focusing on interconnect technologies, data storage technologies, systems software, and tools for large-scale computing systems. These technologies, while critical to ASCI's platform needs, are areas in which private sector development would not otherwise take place, at least not in the time frame required by the stockpile stewardship program.
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From page 13... ...
An objective is to provide a usable and scalable application-development environment for ASCI computing systems, enabling code developers to quickly meet the computational needs of scientists. The development staff works with code developers to identify user requirements and evaluate tool effectiveness, and it develops direct ties with platform partners and other software suppliers to ensure an effective development environment.
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From page 14... ...
A simplified way to look at the ASCI program is as a combination of large-scale computing resources, massive scientific databases, and tale-laboratories, all of which must be put into place to support scientific collaborations, perform large-scale simulations, explore complex data sets, and achieve scientific understanding. ASCI is attempting to build a simulation capability that provides a balanced system one in which computing speed and memory, archival storage speed and capacity, and network speed and throughput are combined to provide a dramatic increase in the performance of scientific simulations.
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From page 15... ...
Because of the tremendous amount of data that will be produced, the user must be able to switch easily from coarse resolution, providing a broad overview of the results, to fine resolution, providing a detailed view of a small region of the data very efficiently. Otherwise even the highestspeed networks available will be overwhelmed.
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From page 16... ...
Scientific Simulation Software Developing scientific simulation software for SMP-based parallel computer systems presents a number of challenges because it entails use of a "hybrid programming model." The hybrid-programming model incorporates both of the standard programming models for parallel computers: the sharedmemory and message-passing programming models. The shared-memory programming model relies on the ability of the programmer to access memory by its location or name.
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From page 17... ...
Science and industry alike will benefit from ASCI's development of vastly more powerful computational methods, algorithms, software tools, methodologies for program development, validation, and verification, code frameworks, and computing systems with ever greater computing power and massive memories. ASCI projects are devoting considerable attention and resources to the development of physics models that are grounded on theory and experiment and lead to practical numerical computations.
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From page 18... ...
The recent report from the NSFIDOE-sponsored "National Workshop on Advanced Scientific Computing" outlined a number of scientific and engineering areas that would be dramatically affected by access to this level of computing capability.5 Taking advantage of this new level of computing capability presents a large number of challenges. We have to consider the computing infrastructure as a whole processing speeds and memory, data storage and management, data analysis and visualization, and networking speed and capacity if we are to realize the promised dramatic increase in computing capability.
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From page 19... ...
But it means keeping several arithmetic units busy, loading and storing data simultaneously, and that is a hard thing to do. So, to actually get the benefits of these faster processors, even one processor, is beyond what many compilers can do.
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