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5.  High Performance Computing Research Facilities

 It is at these facilities that (1) full-scale production systems are  used on Grand Challenge scale applications that cannot be scaled down without modifying the problem being addressed or requiring  unacceptably long execution times, (2) early prototype systems are evaluated, feedback is provided to developers, and systems are made  more mature and robust, (3) small versions of mature systemsare  used for developing parallel applications, and (4) advanced  visualization systems are integrated into the high performance computing environment.  The largest of the Grand Challenge scale  applications are being run on multiple high performance systems located at these HPCC facilities across the country and networked at  gigabit speeds.  These facilities are demonstrating a new paradigm for conducting advanced R&D by the Federal government and  American industry and academia. 
The facilities are a virtual meeting place of an interdisciplinary  group of experts.  These groups include facility staff, hardware and software vendors, Grand Challenge applications researchers,  industrial affiliates that want to develop industry-specific  software, andacademic researchers interested in advancing the  frontier of high performance computing.  HPCC funding is heavily  leveraged bydiscipline-specific agency funds, equipment and  personnel from hardware vendors, funds from state and local  governments anduniversities, with industrial affiliates paying their  fair share.  Industrial affiliation offers a low risk environment for  exploring andultimately exploiting HPCC technology. 
Production-quality operating systems software and software tools  are developed at these facilities.  Applications software developers access their resources over the Internet.  Production-quality  applications are often first run at these facilities, with user access increasingly at gigabit speeds.  With their wide range of hardware  and applications software, these are often sites for benchmarking systems and applications, and feedback is provided to hardware and  software developers and vendors. 
Other broadly common features of the facilities are extensive K-12  and undergraduate educational opportunities; training for researchers, graduate students, and faculty; and publication of  articles in professional journals, annual reports, and newsletters. 
Many of the systems listed below are funded by the named agency  and receive additional funding from other HPCC agencies.  For example,  funding for systems at NSF centers also comes from ARPA,  NASA, and NIH. 
The resources at each facility and their key focus areas are as  follows: 
**NSF Supercomputer Centers**
NSF funds four Supercomputer Centers and augments the computing  facilities at NCAR (the National Center for Atmospheric Research).  The systems at these centers are listed below. 
The term Metacenter refers to the joint cooperative activities of  these centers and others in naturally overlapping research and technology areas.  The Metacenter facilitates collaboration,  communication, technical progress, and interoperability among participating institutions.  To encourage further extension and  collaborative integration of Metacenter activities with those of  otherproviders of high performance computing, communications, and  information infrastructure, in FY 1994 NSF initiated a program of Metacenter Regional Alliances (MRAs) resulting in six awards.  In  addition to augmenting national support activities, these MRAs are intended to complement, expand, and strengthen existing Metacenter  activities at the regional, state, or local level.  Participants inMRAs  are expected to prototype new local and regional activities having  the potential for being broadly replicated.  NSF intends to adda  similar number of MRAs in FY 1995. 
http://pscinfo.psc.edu/MetaCenter/MetaScience/welcome.html
***Cornell Theory Center (CTC), Ithaca, NY*
The main CTC system is a 512-processor IBM SP-2.  One CTC focus  area is a globally scalable computing environment, including mass storage, I/O capability, networking, archival storage, data  processing power, and graphics power. 
http://www.tc.cornell.edu/ctc.html 
***National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Urbana- Champaign, IL*
Resources include: 
- Convex C-3880 (with 8 processors, 4 GB memory, and 100 GB high speed disk)  Convex Exemplar (one 8-processor hypernode, 512 MB memory, and 4 GB disk, with an upgrade to a system with 64-processor, 8GB memory, and 180 GB high speed disk in FY 1995) 
Silicon Graphics Power Challenge (with 16 processors, 4 GB memory, and 100 GB high speed disk) 
Thinking Machines CM-5 (with 512 compute nodes, 16 GB memory, and 140 GB high speed parallel disk) 
The three-tiered NCSA network consists of (1) Ethernet or FDDI to  the desktop; (2) FDDI backbone between buildings, high-endsystems,  and the Internet; and (3) HiPPI between high performance computing  systems, mass storage, and high-end peripherals. 
NCSA is also involved in ATM research in (1) a local area network,  (2) a trans-continental 155 Mb/s (SONET OC-3) national network, and (3) the BLANCA gigabit testbed at 622 Mb/s (SONET OC-12). 
NCSA's virtual reality CAVE is described in Section II.3, and NCSA  Mosaic is described earlier.
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/NCSAHome.html 
***Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center (PSC), Pittsburgh, PA*
Resources include: 
- The first single-vendor heterogeneous system consisting of a Cray Research T3D (with 512 processors, each with 64 MB ofmemory) coupled to a C90 (with 16 processors and 4 GB of memory)  14-processor DEC Alpha workstation cluster 
HiPPI and FDDI network connecting these resources to each other and to storage devices 
http://pscinfo.psc.edu/ 
***San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), San Diego, CA*
Resources include: 
- Cray Research C90 (with 8 vector processors)  Intel Paragon (with 400 processors) 
Thinking Machines CM-2 (with 8,192 processors) 
Eight-workstation DEC Alpha cluster 
An environmental modeling case study performed at SDSC appears in the Case Studies Section.
http://www.sdsc.edu/SDSCHome.html 
***National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Boulder, CO*
NSF HPCC funds enabled NCAR to acquire a 64-processor Cray  Research T3D and an 8-processor IBM SP-1 for use in the global  climatemodeling Grand Challenge. 
http://www.ucar.edu/homepage.html 
**NSF Science and Technology Centers**
Each of these four Centers addresses a particular research area;  common to all four is cross-disciplinary focus, knowledge transfer and links to the private sector, and education and outreach.  The  Centers are: 
***The Center for Research in Parallel Computation (CRPC) at Rice  University*
CRPC aims to make parallel computing systems as easy to use as  conventional computing systems -- efforts include HPF, PVM, MPI, and NHSE, HPC++, algorithms for physical simulation, algorithms  using parallel optimization, and ScaLAPACK.  These are described in Section II.3.
http://www.cs.rice.edu/CRPC/bluebook/bluebook.html 
***The Center for Computer Graphics and Scientific Visualization at the  University of Utah*
This Center is building and displaying models that are visually and  measurably indistinguishable from real world entities. 
http://www.graphics.cornell.edu/GVSTC.html 
***The Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer  Science headquartered at Rutgers University*
This Center is applying discrete mathematics and theoretical  computer science to solving fundamental problems in science and engineering; in FY 1995 a special year on Mathematical Support for  Molecular Biology, focusing on DNA sequencing and proteinstructure,  was begun; in FY 1996 a special year on Logic and Algorithms,  focusing on the relationship between mathematics and computational algorithms, will begin. 
http://dimacs.rutgers.edu/ 
***The Center for Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania*
This Center studies the human mind through the interaction of  disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, linguistics, logic, and computer science.  Work in human cognition, perception, natural  language processing, and parallel computing has applications in  roboticand manufacturing systems, human-machine interfaces, and  language teaching and translational tools. 
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~ircs/homepage.html 
**NASA Testbeds**
NASA maintains testbeds throughout the country to offer a diversity  in configuration and capability.  The testbeds are: 
***Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA*
Resources include: 
- IBM SP-2 (with 160 processors, 20 GB memory, 320 GB mass storage, 11.6 Gflops sustained performance)  Intel Paragon (with 208 compute nodes, 16 service nodes, 7 GB memory, 16 Mflops peak speed) 
Thinking Machines CM-5 (with 128 compute nodes -- each consisting of a SPARC processor and 4 vector processors, 4 GBmemory, 48 GB scalable disk array, peak speed 16 Gflops), which is also used by the Naval Research Laboratory 
***Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD*
Resources include: 
- Convex SPP-1 (with 8 processors)  MasPar MP-2 (16,384 processors, 1 GB memory, 22 GB parallel disk array, 6.2 Gflops peak speed, SIMD (Single InstructionMultiple Data)); MP-1 (8,192 processors, 512 MB memory, 0.6 Gflops); 2 MP-1 (4,096 processors, 256 MB memory, 0.3 Gflopseach).  These four systems have all been connected by a 4-by-4 HiPPI switch.  Peak performance is 7.5 Gflops.  MasPar applications arebeing modified to take advantage of the HiPPI network in order to distribute the workload across the four MasPar systems.  NASAParallel Benchmark codes are being implemented on the cluster in FY 1995.  This cluster demonstrates combining SIMD and MIMD(Multiple Instruction Multiple Data) programming styles and enables MasPar to move beyond its current 16,384-processor ceiling. 
http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/hpccm/accomp/94accomp/94accomps.html
***Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, CA*
Resources include: 
- Cray Research T3D (with 256 processors -- each processor is a DEC Alpha with peak speed 150 Mflops, 16 GB memory, and 103GB disk)  Intel Delta (with 528 processors) at Caltech 
Intel Paragon (with 56 compute nodes each with 32 MB memory, 4 I/O nodes each with 32 MB memory and 4.8 GB RAID, one HiPPInode with 32 MB memory, one user service node with 32 MB memory, and one boot node with 32 MB memory and 4.8 GB RAID) 
The Paragon came into service in August, 1993, for Earth and Space  Science Grand Challenge applications development.  Peak performance is 5.6 Gflops in single precision (using 56 nodes with  1.8 GB aggregate memory and more than 20 GB aggregate on-line disk).  The system is available to NASA HPCC investigators and  select collaborators.  Interactive access to all compute nodes is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. 
***Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA*
Resources include an Intel Paragon (with 72 compute nodes, 3  service nodes, 8 I/O nodes, 2 Ethernet nodes, 2 HiPPI nodes, and 2  FDDInodes, each with 32 MB memory and 38 GB disk). 
***Lewis Research Center, Cleveland, OH*
Resources include an IBM SP-1 (with 16 processors, 2 GB disk, 800  Mflops peak speed). 
Other Resources 
These include: 
- IBM RS6000 workstation cluster (32 nodes, 3 GB memory, 1.6 Gflops peak speed) that is part of a 128-node IBM SP-1 consortiumat Argonne National Laboratory  Kendall Square Research KSR-1 (56 nodes, 1.8 GB memory, 3 GB disk, MIMD) at the University of Washington 
Further information about these NASA testbeds is at: 
http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/hpccm/accomp/94accomp/ess94.accomps/ess4.html****************************