1. PACI Program : One Partner’s View Paul R. Woodward LCSE, Univ. of Minnesota NSF Blue Ribbon Committee Meeting Pasadena, CA, 1/22/02

2. Is PACI meeting community needs? I will focus on the issue of Coordinated Participation on a National Scale: Team efforts are working. NCSA’s Expeditions will enhance this. NCSA’s “_____-in-a-box” program. ACCESS Grid for deployment and training. Mid-range systems can exploit PACI developments.

3. My Personal NCSA Team Example: Bob Wilhelmson (Environmental Hydrology AT Team). Largest simulation 50 million grid cells. Needs billions of cells to capture tornado genesis. Needs high single CPU performance. Needs high parallel performance. Needs multi-TB data visualization.

4. LCSE (Distributed Computing ET Team). PPM code framework gets high parallel performance (>6000 CPUs). Manual Fortran transformations give PPM high single CPU performance. LCSE visualization tools handle multi-TB data sets interactively. LCSE tools make PowerWall movies. Also, have highly accurate advection schemes & other cool numerical methods.

5. Why not just put these 2 teams together? Need to exploit this collaboration to produce generally useful infrastructure. Manual code transformations will not do. Not enough to just get Wilhelmson using LCSE parallel code framework and visualization tools. Exploit collaboration to forge general code transformation tools, module libraries, parallel frameworks, visualization utilities.

6. Ken Kennedy (Performance ET Team). Has major code transformation tools from HPF project. Has serious input to vendor compilers. Working with both other teams to build precompiler that can be used more widely than this collaboration. Can influence vendors to adopt precompiler technology, once proven. Should benefit wide community.

7. Bill Gropp (leader of new NCSA Performance Expedition): Multiple MPI projects. Working with LCSE to provide wide- area bulk data transfers at high speed. Will help turn PPM, COMMAS, HVR into Grid applications. Rob Pennington (NCSA clusters): He modified NCSA cluster configuration to support PPM parallel framework.

8. Faisal Saied (NCSA performance group): Interacting with us to extend benefits of this collaboration to other users. Polly Baker (NCSA Visualization): Helping us to make LCSE visualization tools work with NCSA PowerWall system. Donna Cox (NCSA visualization): Using LCSE visualization tools for Discovery Channel project & helping to make them interoperable with NCSA tools like the Virtual Director.

9. I will go over just the titles of the next slides, but I can discuss any of these in more detail, in case there are questions:

10. Distributed Terascale Facility: 1.I like the IA-64 CPU. Fastest today. Intel will “always” be there. SIMD offers stellar performance for vector code. Can potentially switch in and out of vector mode with fine granularity. Compiler group responsive. Good IA64 code runs well on my laptop.

11. 2.I like clusters. Only way to achieve scale today. Exploits and drives third-party network development. Guarantees that software runs on affordable local systems. Clearly separates realm for supercomputing system effort: making hundreds of nodes cooperate.

12. 3.I like little SMPs. Everybody has them. Easy to use very well. You can’t get by with staying inside one box, so must confront problem. Forces programmers to think very carefully about accessing shared data. Big SMPs aren’t really SMPs anyway. Simplifies programming model.

13. 4.I like the Grid. Visionary. Potentially revolutionary. Access to distributed data easiest. Access to instruments next. Cooperative use of computational engines hardest. Do it all from my laptop someday. Forces a time-sharing mentality, and can finally get us out of batch mode.