SYSTEMS

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) will feature its research into innovative high-performance computing systems in Booth 1639 at SC05 in Seattle Nov. 12-18. Central to NCSA's mission is the push to research and deploy innovative systems that decrease the cost and/or extend the range of computational science and engineering. Tomorrow's advanced computing systems will include processors with multiple processor cores on each chip, reconfigurable computers based on rapidly advancing field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and heterogeneous systems with fast communications fabrics interconnecting various types of processors. These new systems have the potential to dramatically increase the fidelity and range of simulations and the scope and speed of analysis, data mining, and visualization. They also pose significant technical challenges. NCSA Chief Technology Officer Rob Pennington will talk about NCSA's leadership in the instrumentation, measurement, modeling, testing, and evaluation of innovative computing systems—both hardware and software—during a presentation at 1 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 15 in the center's booth. Other presentations detailing the research and deployment activities of NCSA's Innovative Systems Laboratory will include: * From 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 13, NCSA principal engineer David Pointer will be one of four presenters at a Reconfigurable Supercomputing tutorial. The tutorial will introduce reconfigurable supercomputing and its advances in systems, programming, applications, and tools. Reconfigurable systems from SRC, Cray, SGI, and Star Bridge as well as COTS-based efforts will be considered. Application developments and performance studies will be presented. A comparative case study will be demonstrated from development to compilation and running across the aforementioned platforms. In addition to Pointer, presenters will be Tarek El-Ghazawi of George Washington University, Duncan Buell from the University of South Carolina, and Kris Gaj of George Mason University. * At 2 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 15 in NCSA's booth, Pointer and NCSA researchers David Raila and Craig Steffen will give a talk on "Reconfigurable Systems Applications Programming," describing how researchers in the center's Innovative Systems Laboratory are working with application scientists to explore the potential of FPGA systems. Insights, lessons learned, and results gained from porting the NAMD, BLAST, and MATPHOT applications to reconfigurable architectures will be presented. * Pointer, Raila, and Steffen also will be available at NCSA's booth during exhibit hours to discuss the center's reconfigurable systems research and will conduct informal demonstrations using reconfigurable hardware installed in the booth. For more information on innovative systems research at NCSA, go to its Web site. NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) is a unique state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale cyberinfrastructure that advances science and engineering. Located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, NCSA is one of the leading National Science Foundation-supported supercomputing centers. Additional support comes from the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, private sector partners, and other federal agencies. For more information, see its Web site.