The purpose of the ASTA component is to develop the scalable parallel algorithms and software needed to realize the potential of the new high performance computing systems in solving Grand Challenge problems in science and engineering. The early experimental use of this software on the new systems accelerates their maturation and identifies and resolves scaling issues on the most challenging problems.
The principal objectives of the ASTA component are to:
The ASTA component is composed of four elements:
Prototype applications software will be developed to address computationally intensive problems such as the Grand Challenges. Solution of these problems is not only critical to the missions of agencies in the HPCC Program, but has broad applicability to the national technology base. Continuing increases in computational power enable researchers in government, industry, and academia to address problems of greater magnitude and complexity. Increased computational power enables:
Multidisciplinary teams of computational scientists and disciplinary specialists from one or more Federal agencies and from industry and academia are working together to address these problems. Many of these Grand Challenges projects are cofunded and cosponsored by industry.
Significant progress has already been made toward solving many of these problems, and is expected to continue as the Program progresses. These new computational approaches are already being incorporated by industry into new products, services, and industrial processes such as testing and manufacturing.
A complete collection of software components and tools is essential for a mature scalable parallel computing environment that supports portable software. These software components and tools must include standard higher level languages; advanced compilers; tools for performance measurement, optimization and parallelization, debugging and analysis; visualization capabilities; and interoperability and data management protocols.
As scalable parallel computing extends to a distributed computing environment, greater demands will be made upon the advanced network technologies developed and deployed through the NREN component. Operating systems and database management software for heterogeneous configurations of workstations and high performance servers will be developed along with remote procedure calls and interprocess communication protocols to support gigabit per second interconnections.
Broad industry involvement will be promoted through the identification and development of system structures using open interfaces. Industry involvement will also increase as computational approaches become available for more problem domains and more individuals are trained in high performance computing.
Portable scalable software libraries are being developed to enable software to move across different computational platforms and from one generation to the next. The performance and generality of the new computing technologies will be evaluated using a variety of experimental applications. Standard systems-level tools will be developed to support visualization of data and processes.
The HPCRCs will deploy prototype large scale parallel computing facilities accessible over the Internet through the integration of advanced and innovative computing architectures (both hardware and software). Computational scientists working on Grand Challenge applications, software components and tools, and computational techniques will be able to access the largest advanced systems available in order to conduct a wide spectrum of experiments and scalability studies. Through the HPCRCs, the HPCC Program will evaluate prototype system and subsystem interfaces, protocols, advanced prototypes of hierarchical storage subsystems, and high performance visualization facilities. This work is done in cooperation with the Evaluation of Early Systems element of the HPCS component.
The majority of ASTA Grand Challenge research has focused on key computational models using first generation HPCC computers. This research will be extended to include applications software for multidisciplinary applications, hybrid computational models, and heterogeneous and distributed problems on second generation computer testbeds.
HPCC Agency Grand Challenge Research Teams
NSF -- Computational science and engineering in academic disciplinesDOE -- Energy and materials
NASA -- Aerosciences and Earth and space sciences
NIH -- Biomedical applications
NOAA -- Atmospheric and oceanic computational modeling
EPA -- Environmental modeling
Collaboration with industry and academia, primarily through CRADAs and consortia, is a high priority. Collaborative efforts are currently underway in the areas of environmental and Earth sciences; computational physics; computational biology; computational chemistry; material sciences; and computational fluid and plasma dynamics.
A four day "Workshop and Conference on Grand Challenge Applications and Software Technology" was held during May 1993 in Pittsburgh, PA. Funded by nine HPCC agencies, it brought together some 30 Grand Challenge teams. Discussions centered on multidisciplinary computational science research issues and approaches, the identification of major technology challenges facing users and providers, and refinements in software technology needed for Grand Challenges research applications. A special session was devoted to industrial applications, including the aeronautics, automotive, chemical, energy, financial, health care, and textile industries.
The large collection of software needed to address the Grand Challenges and other computationally intensive problems is certain to grow at a rapid rate. Effective and efficient mechanisms to manage and reuse this software are essential.
Toward this end, NASA coordinates the collection of and access to a high performance computing software repository. The High Performance Computing Software Exchange uses ARPA's wide area file systems and NASA's distributed access to electronic data to connect software repositories in several Federal agencies. These repositories include netlib from NSF and DOE, and NIST's Guide to Available Mathematical Software (GAMS) (described in the Case Studies section). They will be expanded to include databases and bibliographic archives.
Mosaic, a hypermedia interface to repositories throughout the Internet, including gopher and WAIS, has been developed by the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA). (Click here to connect to the NCSA World-Wide Web server.) In addition to providing a means to browse the Internet, it enables research results to be electronically published with text, images, image sequences, software libraries, and other resources. (Mosaic screens are shown in the NSF section.)
An HPCC Software Exchange Prototype System is being built to establish foundations and guidelines for software submission standards, directories, indices, and Unix client/server interfaces. The critical processes and procedures to be used are derived from a 1992 Software Sharing Experiment, which identified and reviewed current software and set priorities and mechanisms for creating needed software.
Two examples illustrate the collaborative efforts initiated through the HPCC Program:
Scalable parallel systems are also located at the NSF sponsored Supercomputer Centers -- the Cornell Theory Center (CTC), the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA) at Champaign-Urbana, the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center, and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). (Click on the links above to connect to the respective gopher servers.) Plans are underway to establish a "metacenter" in which these Centers will be interconnected via high performance networks, allowing their supercomputing resources to be used as if they were an integrated high performance computing system.
NSF's Supercomputer Centers offer an interdisciplinary and collaborative environment for industrial and academic researchers. More than 100 corporations have formal affiliations with the Centers resulting in transition of enabling technologies and expertise. The Centers also work directly with vendors to identify and predict the needs of the computational science research community and to develop and test hardware and software systems. Special programs at the Centers are funded by other agencies, including the NIH Biomedical Research Technology program in biomedical computing applications at CTC and NCSA. Other federally-supported high performance computing activities not coordinated or budgeted through the HPCC Program, such as the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, CO, maintain important connections with HPCC.
DOE and NASA have also established HPCRCs. These include the DOE facilities at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory and NASA facilities at Ames Research Center and the Goddard Space Flight Center. (Click on the links above to connect to servers at DOE facilites.)
The Consortium on Advanced Modeling of Regional Air Quality (CAMRAQ) is working to develop pollution modeling systems, such as the regional environmental impact of pollutants including ozone, sulfate, nitrates, and articulates. Participants include:
DOE AND NASA are responsible for coordinating Grand Challenges applications software development, and are coordinating testbed development to ensure that a diverse set of computing systems are evaluated. Applications software and high performance computing benchmarks will be used by participating agencies to evaluate high performance computing system options. A key component of this effort will be to provide feedback to developers of teraops systems.
ASTA Milestones