Supercomputers

This guide provides a comprehensive overview of High Performance Computing (HPC) to equip students with a full skill set including cluster setup, network selection, and a background of supercomputing competitions. It covers the system, architecture, evaluating approaches, and other practical supercomputing techniques. As the world’s largest supercomputing hackathon, the ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge has attracted a growing number of new talent to supercomputing and has greatly promoted communications in the global HPC community. Enclosed in this book, readers will also find how to analyze and optimize supercomputing systems and applications in real science and engineering cases.

This uniquely comprehensive book brings together the vast amount of technical, economic, and political information and the analyses of supercomputing that have hitherto been buried in the frequently inaccessible "gray literature." Seventy-nine distinguished participants in the second Frontiers of Supercomputing conference offer perceptive and often controversial views on the emerging computing environment in the United States. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

Massive amounts of numeric data are far more comprehensible when converted into graphical form. Hence visualization is becoming an integral part of many areas of research. The idea of visualization is not new, but techniques for visualization are still being developed, and visualization research is just beginning to be recognized as a cornerstone of future computer science. As scientists handle increasingly complex problems with computers, visualization will become an even more essential tool for extracting sense from numbers. This volume is a collection of the best papers selected from those presented at the August 1988 Visualization in Supercomputing Conference in Tokyo, Japan. It is divided into three parts: visualization applications, hardware and performance, and visualization theory. Subjects covered include visualization methods used in computational fluid dynamics research, time-to-solution aspects of visualization, the use of parallel/vector computers with finite element method systems, basic computational performance of two graphics supercomputers, and the applicability of the volume imaging concept in various fields.

Awareness of the need and potential of supercomputers for scientific and engineering research has grown tremendously in the past few years. It has culminated in the Super computer Initiative undertaken two years aga by the National Science Foundation and presently under full development in the United States. Similar initiatives are under way in several European countries and in Japan too. Thus the organization of a symposium on 'Supercomputer Simulations in Chemistry' appeared timely, and such a meeting was held in Montreal (Canada) in August 1985, sponsored by IBM-Kingston and IBM-Canada, and organized by Dr. Enrico Clementi and Dr. Michel Dupuis. In connection with this, IBM's support of the Cornell University Supercomputer Center, several projects in the IBM Research Division, the experimental parallel engine (ICAP) assembled at IBM-Kingston, and the announcement (Fall 1985) of an add-on vector feature to the 3090 IBM mainframe underscore IBM's commitment to high-end scientific/engineering computing. The papers presented in this volume discuss topics in quantum mechanical and statis tical mechanical simulations, both of which test the limits of computer hardware and soft ware. Already a great deal of effort has been put into using vector supercomputers in these two areae. Much more is needed and, without doubt, ie bound to happen. To start, an historical perspective of computational quantum chemistry is provided by Professor Löwdin. The contribution by Ohno and co-workers gives an indication of the present status of Japanese supercomputers. Kutzelnigg et al. , Bauschlicher et al. , and Guest et al.