Multicore Computational Center
Multicore Computational Center
This blog report concludes our extremely successful first year of research accomplishments and evangelism efforts of the staff of the Multicore Computational Center. Successful in terms of the many awards, gifts, publications, system hardware and software installations and national recognition gathered by the MC2 staff which in actuality was only a gestation period of nine months. Equally noteworthy is our identification and planning of exciting new initiatives for the coming year, which hopefully will be part of a second year IBM extension of MC2.
Let me now share with you some of the past accomplishments by citing some in a random order of importance:
We started the year with four new research assistants supported by the IBM award and ended the year with commitments from independent sources of funding to continue the Cell multicore research of these gifted graduate students for the coming year. In particular, David Chapman was awarded a NASA 3 year fellowship for climate analysis service studies, Phuong Nguyen funding from the follow on NASA Web Based Service Oriented Atmospheric Radiance Grant for her work on multiyear cloud oscillation dynamics, Nancy Walia from the Laboratory of Telecommunication Sciences for large suffix array algorithm implementations and Srinivastan Kannan was granted a 1 year fellowship by Bartron Medical Imaging Inc. to continue his development of the recursive segmentation algorithm for the cell processing system. On behalf of the MC2 we wish to extend our congrats to our research assistants and their faculty mentors.
Received and installed the 11 QS20s which are now operational as a Cell cluster within the ‘bluegrit’ PBS scheduling system. The configuration allows clients to request access to either Cell blades or power pc blades presenting itself as a hybrid system.
Receipt of a gift from Google of two rack servers with a combined disk storage of 4.5 Tbs to support bluegrit's growing storage demands. This gift was in response to our offer to provide web based software services for transforming atmospheric IR thermal radiances from multiple spaceborne instruments into accurate projections onto gridded arrays for studying such climate phenomena as El Nino, Cloud producing oscillations and the Earth’s outgoing long wave radiation related to global warming.
Soar project made highly significant progress this quarter leading to the publication of eight papers at conferences, publications in proceedings and one accepted for publication in a highly prestigious peer reviewed journal. The progress involved the implementation of version 2.0 of the SOAR system allowing asynchronous soap messaging and responses, development of a ray tracing algorithm on the cell processor for accurately accounting for the scan angle adjustments, and analysis of climate processes such as the MJO, multi year anomalies and calculation of outgoing long wave radiation.
NASA Hqs approved the third year option of the SOAR project in the face of severe agency science funding cutbacks as a result of the very successful accomplishments described briefly above.
A Suffix array algorithm entirely with internal memory was programmed in C and executed on ‘bluegrit’ successfully . Currently implemented an external memory version of the algorithm capable of creating a terabyte suffix array. Successful performance has led to requests from the Laboratory of Telecommunication Sciences to request a 2nd year proposal.
S. Zhou of Northrop Grumman completed Cell implementation of the solar radiation code of the NASA GEOS 5 model on the Cell cluster at MC2 and showed significant factors of Cell performance improvements compared to Intel multicore processors. A paper was submitted and the results were presented at the ISC’08.
Visit to Watson Labs by Associate Director Ye. Yesha, and staff members J. Dorband, Ya. Yesha, D. Chapman to review status of projects with the Cell ecosystem team led by IBM manager, Michael Perrone. As a result, collaborations have been fostered with IBM scientists Lurng-Kuo Liu and Fabrizzio Petrini. An additional collaboration was established by a subsequent visit from Ye. Yesha with Joanna Ng, Director of CAS Toronto for a joint study of virtual hybrid computing.
At the same time Yelena et. al visited IBM Watson, Dr. Halem attended the Hadoop Summit and Data Intensive Computing workshop convened by CRA and hosted by Apache Yahoo with a restricted number of invitations. See the following URL http://developer.yahoo.com/hadoop/summit/ The new NSF CISE director also attended and announced her intention of releasing a solicitation which MC2 plans to respond by July 17. Proposed SOAR data exchange and collaboration with Prof. Robert Grossman of U/IL at Chicago.
Dr. Halem has been invited by the Lab of Telecommunication Sciences to serve on their organizing committee for a Cloud Computing workshop to be hosted on the East Coast in the winter of 2008.
Cell programming course completed with 10 project reports posted on the MC2 web page. Three projects of the ten are being taken forward as master’s thesis proposals with the students involved in the course.
Masters‘s degrees have been awarded to two research assistants, David Chapman and Phuong Nguyen. In addition, David is currently serving as an intern at IBM Austin working on Cell programs. Ms. Nguyen will continue to work full time during he latter part of this quarter and during the summer. Srini Kannan has taken an internship at SAP while Nancy Walia is an intern at Networks Applications.
Convened two planning meetings and formed a broad based organizing committee for the 1st workshop “Frontiers of Multicore Computing” to be hosted at UMBC on August 27-28,2008.
Held two day IBM site review of MC2 covering the past years research and evangelism activities and plans and research proposals for year 2.
Attended meeting on SSME convened by the EU and presented paper on Service Science for Data Intensive Computing. Meeting with IBM Haifa on cloud computing June 10. Also meeting with Prof.’s from the Technion, Weitzman Institute and Hebrew University to identify future post docs and visiting prof’s.during the coming year.
Proposed a multicore WRF session at the forthcoming American Geophysical Union Dec. 08 with Dr. Shujia Zhou, myself and Dr. John Michalakes the lead developer of WRF. This conference draws more than 4000 scientists from all disciplines within the Geosciences.
Dr. Weidong Kuo, Executive SOA Architect from IBM Beijing, visited the MC2 for one week and delivered two lectures on IBM product development in the area of SOA. Also met with faculty and graduate students to review research activities of the MC2. Discussed proposal of an I/UCRC site at University of Beijing with Dr. Kuo, formerly Chair of the CS department of computer science, with their potential industry partners upon an award by NSF to MC2.
Meeting with Jack Flora, IBM Client Executive for NASA,IBM Public Sector –Federal and Mladen Klarcic IBM Bethesda on June 24 to explore establishing an Academic Climate Analysis Center jointly with IBM at the UMBC Tech Park at the suggestion of the NASA Goddard Chief of their supercomputing center NCCS. This is a follow up to what I understand is a major IBM computer acquisition.
Developing a joint agreement with a major Aerospace Defense Corporation to be a subcontractor on a HPC proposal to the DOD on Performance Evaluations of new technologies.
In summary, this year has laid the foundation for even greater substantial Cell research contributions to be forthcoming in the application of multicore computations to the areas of Aerospace, Environmental sciences, Defense and Digital media.
Sincerely,
Milt Halem, Director