THE ASCI PROGRAM: USHERING IN THE ERA OF TERASCALE SCIENTIFIC SIMULATIONS

摘要

Thanks to the U.S. Department of Energy's Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI), the highperformancerncomputing industry as well as computational modeling and simulation have beenrnreinvigorated. ASCI is a mission-based activity whose goal is to enable the use of computer simulation tornassess the state of the nuclear weapons stockpile without resorting to nuclear testing. Such simulationsrnare extremely complex and will require computers orders of magnitude more powerful than the largestrnsystems in place today.rnASCI has already put in place three systems with formidable computing power (over 3 Teraflops) as wellrnas huge memories, and plans additional systems culminating with a 100 Teraflops machine in the yearrn2004. In addition to computing platforms, the ASCI program is addressing the software environmentsrnthat are needed to use such large systems effectively and the visualization and storage facilities that willrnbe needed to "see and understand" the output from the simulations that will be run on the ASCI machines,rnas well as to archive the results.rnThe pace of development of the ASCI computers is greatly accelerating the availability of systems thatrnwill enable calculations of staggering complexity and size. While these developments are required to meetrnthe requirements of the ASCI mission, the resulting systems will be of great value to virtually all high-endrnscientific computing applications. The ASCI machines are built by aggregating large numbers ofrnstandard commercial systems and the software environment is designed to be as portable as possiblernacross different makes of computers. Many of the algorithms, programming methodologies, and softwarerntools developed for ASCI applications will benefit scientific and engineering applications in general.rnThis talk will describe the hardware and software technologies that are being developed by ASCI and itsrnpartners and the types of applications that are enabled by those technologies. As usual, the mostrnimportant, difficult, and interesting developments are in the software, both applications and systemrnsoftware and tools.