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TetraPower 970MP Project
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Personal Supercomputing
in category Applications & Software
proposed by Kai Gerd Schwebke on 27th May 2006 |
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Project Proposal
Personal Supercomputing
Many fields of research are supported by applications needing
decent computing power. In the past, the only option was batch
or online access to a remote supercomputer shared with other
users and therefore additional coordination overhead.
Now researches have another option: personal supercomputing.
The exclusive access to a high performance computer accelerates
and eases the development of research applications
(e.g. debugging or benchmark).
The Project
In this project a research software package for the Generalized
Finite Element Method (GFEM) will be ported to the PPC platform.
The main demand for processing power arises from solving a special,
large and semidefinite linear equation system. Popular solvers,
e.g. multi-grid, can only solve for definite systems.
The algorithm used allows hybrid parallelization:
- The problem domain is decomposed into weakly coupled
sub-domains, which can be solved with low synchronization
overhead. The MPI (message passing interface) API is
applied here.
- The sub-domains may be subject to a further local
parallelization exploiting shared memory multiprocessing
(pthread API) or vectorized matrix-vector multiply operations.
The package already runs on AMD Athlon or Intel IA-32/Linux personal computers
and SGI Origin/Irix NUMA supercomputers. The speedup on SGI Origin platform
comparing 1 to 10 processors is in the range of 6...8.
On porting to PPC platform the main effort will be implementing
vectorized and shared memory multiprocessing (SMP).
To enable the building of multi-node clusters the message passing paradigm
will be covered, too. This will not be the main focus, however.
More on GFEM: http://www.bauv.unibw-muenchen.de/bauv1/oc/html/forschung/gfem/
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Project Blog Entries
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No blog entries for this project
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