Our studies indicate such a distributed memory architecture is quite appropriate for those codes not requiring extensive load balancing or interprocessor communication. This has allowed many applications to move to departmental scale clusters. If load balancing is an application issue, then a shared memory architecture with very fast memory backplanes is critical to achieving good performance. Because of this current dual memory architecture approach and success, NCSA is committed to providing to users the largest shared memory machines as well as the largest distributed memory machines available. From an applications development point of view, we have observed that most applications optimized for vector processors also become good performers on superscalar workstation level machines.
Industrial users require a wide spectrum of supported, third-party applications.
With this in mind, a further goal is to move toward systems that offer binary compatibility with desktop machines to facilitate development and analysis phases of a research effort to be performed at the user's local site. These considerations have led to the following strategy. The outcome of this upgrade plan will be to again greatly increase the computational capability in 1994, much as we did in 1993 with the production use of the CM-5 and C3880. The goal will be to continue to aggressively expand NCSA's capacity over the next few years. Specific acquisition and upgrade paths for this year are detailed below, followed by a discussion of our application migration strategy.