Reconfigurable Application Specific Computers RASCs Advanced Architectures with Multiple Processors and Field Programmable Gate Arrays FPGAs Computational Science at the University at Albany Ian GroutLenore Mullin Dept. of Electronic and Department of Computer Science and Computer Engineering College of Computing and Information University of Limerick Department of Physics Ireland College of Arts and Sciences

12 July RASCs and FPGAs Polymorphic Computing Architectures –DARPA PCA Project –MIT Lincoln Laboratory –Combines both hardware- and software- programming techniques Needs hardware design engineers Needs computer scientists

12 July Computational Science Interdisciplinary –Engineering –Computer and Information Sciences –Mathematics –Physics (and other Physical and Biological Sciences)

12 July Engineering in Computational Science Advanced Architectures NUMAs and RASCs –Multiple processors –Multiple levels of memory –Multiple FPGAs: Needs hardware design engineers –Networks of RASCs –Grids of Networks of RASCs –Grids of homogeneous and heterogeneous architectures

12 July CCI in Computational Science –Parallel and Distributed Computing/Algorithms –Grid Computing –Visualization and Graphics –Networks –Software and Hardware Verification –Scientific Databases: ATLAS e.g. Portable and Scalable Scientific Algorithms and Libraries –e.g. Linpack, Lapack, Scalapack: Jack Dongarra at Oak Ridge National Labs Array Based Computing –Computational Matrix Mechanics –Operators, Density Matrices, DMRGs, … –Quantum Computation and Simulation, Quantum Algorithms –Digital Signal Processing »Radar, Sonar, Imaging: FFT, QR, LU, SVD, TDC, …

12 July Applied Mathematics and Physics in Computational Science –Computational Physics Huge Databases: ATLAS project e.g. Real Time DSP: Radar, Sonar, Imaging –Computational, Time, and Space Intensive Operations »Transforms, Matrix Decomposition, … Ab-initio Simulations –Requires Discrete Mathematics –Requires hundreds, thousands or more particles »Parallel, Distributed, Grid Computing –PDE solvers, multigrid algorithms, adaptive multigrid algorithms –Linear Algebra –Matrix Operators, Density Matrices(DMRG algorithms, … ) –Applied Functional Analysis »Integral Operators and Eigenvalue problems, Hilbert Spaces, etc. –…

12 July Reconfigurable Application Specific Computers SGI MOATB Cray XD1 –We have access to both at NCSA, Washington University and Boston University –Collaborators at Boston University: Martin Herbordt Engineers Access to SGI MOATB RASC –Mullin, Grout, Hunt, and other collaborators will visit BU next week to work with Herbordt and his students –Will also plan to meet with colleagues at MIT Lincoln Lab

12 July Reconfigurable Application Specific Computers SGI MOATB –Rather than fixed implementation, e.g. GPUs, RASC uses FPGAs to allow full reconfigurability –NUMA: Distributed Shared Memory –Independent scaling for CPUs, memory, GPUs, I/O interfaces, and specialized processors –NUMAlink interconnect allows scalability to thousands of CPUs, terabytes of memory, hundreds of IO channels, hundreds of GPUs and thousands of ASICS. –NUMAlink supports basic rings and with the addition of routers; meshes, hypercube, and full fat tress can be built. –Ideal for HPC

12 July FPGA Workshop