Simulation at NASA for the Space Radiation Effort

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Slide 10

What are Our Problems?

As cores go from 43,008 to 1,000,000

Our algorith is stuck at 1000-2000 cores without major rework that we cannot afford

Not sure how many more cores we could utilize if we could afford a rework but << 1,000,000!!!

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As the cores get slower, our execution time gets longer as we cannot use more cores

Yet users want more and better answers as computers get more powerful

OK, as user’s needs become more demanding

Slide 11

What are Our Problems?

HPCWire, 9/24/08, “Intel: CPUs Will Prevail Over Accelerators in HPC”

“What we're finding is that if someone is going to go to the effort of optimizing an application to take advantage of an offload engine, whatever it may be, the first thing they have to do is parallelize their code”

Richard Dracott, General Manager, HPC Business Unit

Slide 12

Am I (we) Unique?

There are many small and large ISV’s

Abaqus < 128 cores

Few open source packages can >>128 cores

Most (if not all) engineering, day-to-day packages cannot use more than 1000 cores

MCNPX can use <2000-4000 cores for certain types of problems

Most everybody needs help!

Those that do not need help can afford

To rewrite code when new architectures arrive

To write code from scratch to fit an architecture

Slide 13

Possible Solutions?

Smarter compilers – User’s Point of View!

No new language, just amend Fortran and C

Like MP but with MPI – Programming Environment

Nice if housed in current environments

Intel

PGI

Absoft

etc…

Do not care if production compile takes days

Enable non-x86 hardware in current compilers

ASICs

GPGPU/Cell

FPGA

etc…

Slide 14

No Real Conclusions

Nothing but the possible solutions

Develop new algoriths to solve the Boltzmann Equation so >1,000,000 cores can be utilized

Over 10M$ and 3 years to parallelize and V&V what we already have and must be done first!!

Over 100M$ and 10 years to develop new methods of solution to fit the vision of chip makers and then V&V the methods

Space Radiation is a small but unique solution domain of the total radiation analysis world