Brian Zaugg Information Technology Consultant

The expanded simulation requirement imposed by RMS’ customers has driven the company to analyze next generation NAS solutions for the organization’s high performance computing environments. Before the simulation requirements, the RMS storage strategy emphasized a single vendor NAS solution. The challenges presented by adding thousands of cores of high performance compute capability per quarter has caused the company to adapt the storage strategy to include a next generation NAS solutions that provide more scalable performance.

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The use of the GPU to service computation instead of rendering video game images is an innovative use of a specialized processor. The GPU is to SIMD processors what Beowulf was to vector and MPP systems. Existing GPU’s are not equivalent to SIMD, as indicated in Suda et al’s 2009 article. (Suda, et al., 2009) However, the low cost CMOS solution has potential to be developed into a replacement, much like Beowulfs replaced vector-processing machines.

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Supercomputing provides large-scale computational resources for solving the largest and most challenging scientific problems, including issues like weather and protein folding simulations. Seymour Cray was a major influence on the architecture of silicon-based, electronic supercomputers. Modern supercomputers continue to be architected using silicon-based electronics and the designs suggested by Cray. However, several new architectures are emerging for computers that are not based on silicon electronics. These new architectures leverage biological, molecular, and quantum physics effects to perform computation in novel ways that promise to solve scientific problems that are intractable to silicon-based, electronic supercomputers. A review of the research literature on supercomputer architecture and emerging non-silicon computers reveals several potential research opportunities.

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