Resources

1. Experimental Computing Laboratory (ExCL)
2. Future Technologies Colloquium Series
3. Publications
4. Call for papers
5. Visitor Information page (maps, lodging information, restaurants)
6. Jobs
7. Software
8. FT Home Page on CSM website

Staff

1. David Bader (joint with Georgia Institute of Technology)
2. Anthony Danalis (joint with University of Tennessee-Knoxville)
3. Jan Hashmi (Group Secretary)
4. Gabriel Marin
5. Collin McCurdy
6. Jeremy Meredith
7. Philip Roth
8. Kyle Spafford
9. Thomas Sterling (joint with Louisiana State University)
10. Olaf Storaasli
11. Vinod Tipparaju
12. Jeffrey Vetter (Group Leader)
13. Weikuan Yu (joint with Auburn University)

Visitors

1. Ernest Cochran
2. Srinivas Sridharan, Notre Dame University

Research

1. Early Evaluation of HPC Systems
2. Emerging Architectures
3. Parallel IO
4. Productive Programming Environments
5. Performance Prediction and Analysis
6. Visualization

Sponsors

News

2010-11-15  --  Tipparaju contributes to 2009 Gordon Bell Finalist application.  Vinod Tipparaju of the Future Technologies group contributed to a team that was selected as a finalist for 2009 ACM Gordon Bell Prize. ACM Gordon Bell Prize honors the world's highest-performing scientific computing applications. The team, comprising members from ORNL, Australian National University, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and Cray Inc., used a computational chemistry application known as NWChem to achieve 1.39 petaflops on Jaguar in a first principles, quantum mechanical exploration of the energy contained in clusters of water molecules. To learn more, visit http://scyourway.supercomputing.org/conference/view/gb118.  

2010-01-28  --  Storaasli reviews the State-of-the-Art in Heterogeneous Computing.  Recent work by ORNL researcher Olaf Storaasli in collaboration with four Oslo colleagues at SINTEF (Norwegian NSF) has resulted in a comprehensive (31 page, 185 references) publication entitled "State-of-the-Art in Heterogeneous Computing" soon to be published by the Journal of Scientific Programming, IOS Press. The publication identifies the key advances and trends over the years in computer hardware and software leading up to accelerators (Cell, GPU and FPGA) used in current and future High-Performance Supercomputers. An in-depth description, strengths & weaknesses of today's three accelerator technologies is given including details with examples (software, applications, performance and cost). Projections are made illustrating which accelerator is best suited for which application area, concluding with emerging architecture features and trends defining the hardware and software architecture of future High-Performance Supercomputers.  

2009-10-21  --  ORNL FT participates in NSF-funded partnership for innovative supercomputer based on graphics processors.  The Georgia Institute of Technology today announced its receipt of a five-year, $12 million Track 2 award from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Office of Cyberinfrastructure to lead a partnership of academic, industry and government experts in the development and deployment of an innovative and experimental high-performance computing (HPC) system. The award provides for the creation of two heterogeneous, HPC systems that will expand the range of research projects that scientists and engineers can tackle, including computational biology, combustion, materials science, and massive visual analytics. The project brings together leading expertise and technology resources from Georgia Tech's College of Computing, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), University of Tennessee, National Institute for Computational Sciences, HP and NVIDIA. 

2009-08-19  --  ORNL and SNL researchers accelerate combustion simulation using GPUs.  Recent work from a team of researchers from ORNL (Kyle Spafford, Jeremy Meredith, Jeffrey Vetter, and Ramanan Sankaran) and from Sandia National Laboratories (Jacqueline Chen and Ray Grout) has explored the performance benefits and accuracy tradeoffs of using graphics processors (GPUs) to accelerate S3D, one of DOE’s leading computational science applications that simulates turbulent combustion. Although they were initially designed for 3D graphics, GPUs have evolved to be an exciting platform for scientific computing due to their impressive processing capabilities and relatively low cost. The results show that computation on the GPU is able to preserve accuracy by using double precision, and execute the application’s most time consuming code up to nine times faster than a traditional CPU. These results will be presented in a paper, entitled “Accelerating S3D: A GPGPU Case Study,” at the upcoming International Workshop on Algorithms, Models, and Tools for Parallel Computing on Heterogeneous Platforms (HeteroPar 2009) http://sips.inesc-id.pt/heteropar/.  

2009-06-15  --  ORNL researchers demonstrate benefits of asynchronous programming in UPC.  Aniruddha Shet (from Computer Science Research Group, CSMD) and Vinod Tipparaju from the Future Technologies group at ORNL have implemented a prototype and demonstrated advantages of asynchronous remote methods (ARM) in UPC. In a paper presented at the APGAS 2009 workshop held in conjunction with 23rd International Conference on Supercomputing (ISC 2009), the team adopt the asynchronous style of programming to parallelize a nested, tree-based code in UPC. To maximize performance without losing the ease of application programming, our team design Asynchronous Remote Methods as a potential extension to the UPC standard. Our prototype implementation of the ARM construct in Berkeley UPC yields within 7% of ideal performance and 20-fold improvement over the original Standard UPC solution for the Refine kernel in the MADNESS application. More information can be found at APGAS09. 

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