Hardware system of the Earth Simulator

The Earth Simulator (ES), developed under the Japanese government’s initiative “Earth Simulator project”, is a highly parallel vector supercomputer system. In this paper, an overview of ES, its architectural features, hardware technology and the result of performance evaluation are described.

In May 2002, the ES was acknowledged to be the most powerful computer in the world: 35.86 teraflop/s for the LINPACK HPC benchmark and 26.58 teraflop/s for an atmospheric general circulation code (AFES). Such a remarkable performance may be attributed to the following three architectural features; vector processor, shared-memory and high-bandwidth non-blocking interconnection crossbar network.

The ES consists of 640 processor nodes (PN) and an interconnection network (IN), which are housed in 320 PN cabinets and 65 IN cabinets. The ES is installed in a specially designed building, 65 m long, 50 m wide and 17 m high. In order to accomplish this advanced system, many kinds of hardware technologies have been developed, such as a high-density and high-frequency LSI, a high-frequency signal transmission, a high-density packaging, and a high-efficiency cooling and power supply system with low noise so as to reduce whole volume of the ES and total power consumption.

For highly parallel processing, a special synchronization means connecting all nodes, Global Barrier Counter (GBC), has been introduced.     

Investigation on compounding and application of C80-C100 high-performance concrete

This paper presents the compounding technology and application of C80-C100 high-performance concrete (HPC) containing ultra-pulverized fly ash composite (PFAC) and superplasticizer. The properties of C80-C100 HPC are also studied systematically. The experimental results indicate that this concrete has excellent workability, high strength, lower drying shrinkage, outstanding volume stability, durability, etc.     

PMSS: A programmable memory system and scheduler for complex memory patterns

HPC industry demands more computing units on FPGAs, to enhance the performance by using task/data parallelism. FPGAs can provide its ultimate performance on certain kernels by customizing the hardware for the applications. However, applications are getting more complex, with multiple kernels and complex data arrangements, generating overhead while scheduling/managing system resources. Due to this reason all classes of multi threaded machines–minicomputer to supercomputer–require to have efficient hardware scheduler and memory manager that improves the effective bandwidth and latency of the DRAM main memory. This architecture could be a very competitive choice for supercomputing systems that meets the demand of parallelism for HPC benchmarks. In this article, we proposed a Programmable Memory System and Scheduler (PMSS), which provides high speed complex data access pattern to the multi threaded architecture. This proposed PMSS system is implemented and tested on a Xilinx ML505 evaluation FPGA board. The performance of the system is compared with a microprocessor based system that has been integrated with the Xilkernel operating system. Results show that the modified PMSS based multi-accelerator system consumes 50% less hardware resources, 32% less on-chip power and achieves approximately a 19x speedup compared to the MicroBlaze based system.     

Experimental study on creep of high-performance concretes

In order to investigate the compression creep of two kinds of high-performance concrete mixtures used for prestressed members in a bridge,an experimental test under laboratory conditions was carried out.Based on the experimental results,a power exponent function was used to model the creep degree of these high-performance concretes(HPCs) for structural numerical analysis,and two series parameters of this function for the HPCs were given with the optimum method of evolution program.The experimental data were compared with CEB-FIP 90 and ACI 92 models.Results show that the two code models both overestimate the creep degree of two HPCs,so it is recommended that the power exponent function should be used for the creep analysis of bridge structure.     

A sliding window technique for interactive high-performance computing scenarios

Interactive high-performance computing is doubtlessly beneficial for many computational science and engineering applications whenever simulation results should be visually processed in real time, i.e. during the computation process. Nevertheless, interactive HPC entails a lot of new challenges that have to be solved – one of them addressing the fast and efficient data transfer between a simulation back end and visualisation front end, as several gigabytes of data per second are nothing unusual for a simulation running on some (hundred) thousand cores. Here, a new approach based on a sliding window technique is introduced that copes with any bandwidth limitations and allows users to study both large and small scale effects of the simulation results in an interactive fashion.     

Lustre文件系统元数据服务恢复机制的改进

Lustre的重启恢复算法需要集群中所有客户端在指定的恢复时间窗口内与服务器重新建立连接,客户端重传未提交的事务请求,服务器严格按照事务序列号重放所有未提交的事务,要求过于严格。针对Lustre可恢复性不强的缺点,提出了基于版本的恢复和共享时提交算法,它们分别对Lustre现有的元数据更新和恢复机制进行了改进和扩展,根据事务之间的依赖关系,允许客户端在更为宽松的条件下进行恢复并加入到集群而不被驱逐,提高了Lustre文件系统的可用性和可恢复性。最后通过一系列实验对改进后的算法的性能进行了评估。     

GPGPU编程技术初探

伴随着GPGPU计算技术的不断发展,HPC高性能计算系统体系结构正在悄然发生着一场变革,这场变革为高性能计算发展提供了一个新的方向、CUDA是NIVIDIA公司提供的利用GPGPU进行并行运算应用开发的一套C语言编程平台,通过它可以利用特定显卡的高性能运算能力进行一些大规模高性能计算,有效提升计算机系统的使用效率,本文主要介绍GPU发展现状以及如何利用CUDA编程技术进行并行运算软件开发．     

高性能计算机在地震资料处理中的应用

本文简要介绍了高性能计算机,并描述了石油勘探基本原理和地震资料处理中叠前偏移等应用对高性能计算机在运算量和存储方面的需求,针对地震资料处理中的应用,讨论了高性能计算机几个关键技术的现状并对未来进行展望。实际情况表明,地震资料处理依赖于高性能计算机等信息技术,同时高性能计算机等信息技术也限制着许多地震资料处理新方法新技术的普遍应用。     

一种高性能计算环境中的计费系统

随着科学技术的不断发展,个人用户对大规模计算能力的需求日益迫切。高性能计算面向个人用户,实现了资源使用方和提供方的双赢,同时也带来了资源计费等问题。本文介绍了一种面向个人用户的集群计费系统。该系统基于Web方式,能够对多种资源计费,适用于当前大多数Linux集群系统,操作简单,应用前景广泛。     

A large scale parallel fluid-structure interaction computing platform for simulating structural responses to a detonation shock

Due to the intrinsic nature of multi-physics, it is prohibitively complex to design and implement a simulation software platform for study of structural responses to a detonation shock. In this article, a partitioned fluid-structure interaction computing platform is designed for parallel simulating structural responses to a detonation shock. The detonation and wave propagation are modeled in an open-source multi-component solver based on OpenFOAM and blastFoam, and the structural responses are simulated through the finite element library deal.II. To capture the interaction dynamics between the fluid and the structure, both solvers are adapted to preCICE. For improving the parallel performance of the computing platform, the inter-solver data is exchanged by peer-to-peer communications and the intermediate server in conventional multi-physics software is eliminated. Furthermore, the coupled solver with detonation support has been deployed on a computing cluster after considering the distributed data storage and load-balancing between solvers. The 3D numerical result of structural responses to a detonation shock is presented and analyzed. On 256 processor cores, the speedup ratio of the simulations for a detonation shock reach 178.0 with 5.1 million of mesh cells and the parallel efficiency achieve 69.5%. The results demonstrate good potential of massively parallel simulations. Overall, a general-purpose fluid-structure interaction software platform with detonation support is proposed by integrating open source codes. And this work has important practical significance for engineering application in fields of construction blasting, mining, and so forth.