Long Road to Reconfigurable Supercomputing

2009-09-01 Tue
fpga pub

We published an unclassified unlimited release (UUR) paper.

Abstract

The field of high performance computing (HPC) currently abounds with excitement about the potential of a broad class of things called accelerators. And, yet, few accelerator based systems are being deployed in general purpose HPC environments. Why is that? This article explores the challenges that accelerators face in the HPC world, with a specific focus on FPGA based systems. We begin with an overview of the characteristics and challenges of typical HPC systems and applications and discuss why FPGAs have the potential to have a significant impact. The bulk of the article is focused on twelve specific areas where FPGA researchers can make contributions to hasten the adoption of FPGAs in HPC environments.

Publications

Service Node Proxies

2009-05-06 Wed
hpc io pub

We published an unclassified unlimited release (UUR) paper.

Abstract

Partitioning massively parallel supercomputers into service nodes running a full-fledged OS and compute nodes running a lightweight kernel has many well-known advantages but renders it difficult to access externally located resources such as high-performance databases that may only communicate via TCP. We describe an implementation of a proxy service that allows service nodes to act as a relay for SQL requests issued by processes running on the compute nodes. This implementation allows us to move toward using HPC systems for scalable informatics on large data sets that simply cannot be processed on smaller machines.

Publications

Presentations

Feature Characterization Library (FCLib)

2008-11-08 Sat
mesh code pub

We published an unclassified unlimited release (UUR) technical report and received permission to release the software.

Publications

Code

Threading Opportunities in Flash-Memory

2008-09-24 Wed
io pub

We presented this unclassified unlimited release (UUR) poster/paper.

Publications

Presentations

High-Performance Data-Intensive Computing

2008-08-14 Thu
io pub

We published this unclassified unlimited release (UUR) article.

Abstract

Data-intensive problems challenge conventional computing architectures with demanding CPU, memory, and I/O requirements. Experiments with three benchmarks suggest that emerging hardware technologies can significantly boost performance of a wide range of applications by increasing compute cycles and bandwidth and reducing latency.

Publication