Reader Jay Blair sent me a pointer to this story from TACC about an Android app that runs a reduced model locally on the cell phone based on results computed over a long series of runs on Ranger.
The team performed a series of expensive high-fidelity simulations on the Ranger supercomputer to generate a small “reduced model” which was transferred to a Google Android smart phone. They were then able to solve problems on the phone and visualize the results on the fly.
The project proved the potential for reduced order methods to perform real-time and reliable simulations for complicated problems on handheld devices.
This approach is already used operationally in a variety of civilian and defense scenarios to allow professionals ranging from bridge fatique assessment teams to rapid crisis response forces to tradeoff some accuracy for an answer right now. Typically these reduced models have run on laptops or larger portable computers, but today’s mobile devices are becoming quite powerful in their own right.
This is not the first time that model reduction algorithms have been used to ameliorate the complexities of large-scale physical simulations. The advantage of the system designed by Knezevic and his colleagues is its rigorous error bounds, which tell a user the range of possible solutions, and provide a metric of whether an answer is accurate or not. The error bounds are based on mathematical theory developed in Prof. Patera’s research group at MIT over a number of years.
“We have a bound on how much accuracy we’re losing with our reduced model, so we can say with rigor that we’re doing supercomputing on a phone,” Knezevic said.
The quantitative understanding of the error bounds is very important, and its a nice addition in this work.
Ten research projects, five from Germany, two from the UK one each from Italy, the Netherlands and Portugal, have been awarded access to the PRACE infrastructure. In total 321.4 Million compute core hours were granted. Sixty-eight applications requesting a total of 1870 Million compute hours were received in this call, which was the first opportunity for researchers to apply for PRACE resources.
Staff at NCSA and IBM evaluated both the open-source Linux and IBM’s AIX as potential operating systems for Blue Waters, extensively testing both on identical hardware at large scale. SARA Computing and Networking Services in the Netherlands and the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) shared their experiences and provided access to their large IBM POWER6 systems, both with more than 3,300 cores and both using Infiniband interconnects. Both ran IBM’s full HPC Software stack and used the GPFS file system. SARA’s system uses Linux, while NCAR uses AIX.
IBM has given Rice one of its first supercomputers with the company’s new POWER7 microprocessors, a $7.6 million award, on the condition that Rice open up access to the computer to all in the Texas Medical Center. For free.
“As an organization that supports true multidisciplinary research, we provide a general access computing platform that must meet a diverse set of application requirements for our user community,” said Jim Wilgenbusch, Director of HPC, Research Associate in the Department of Scientific Computing of FSU’s shared-High Performance Computing facility. “3Leaf Systems is meeting our requirements for performance, flexibility and cost. With this platform we can add, remove, divide up, resize or reallocate resources across traditional hardware boundaries and seamlessly accommodate a variety of programming paradigms and application requirements. This provides us with a level of operational agility that we have not previously experienced.”
A story in the San Jose Mercury News last week 
As the first company to design and build a supercomputer that achieved sustained application performance of more than one petaflops (quadrillion mathematical calculations per second), Cray is committed to the research and development of new technologies necessary to achieve exaflops computing. The challenges are significant and will require research and development into power and cooling infrastructure, system and application resiliency, lightweight communication, efficient processor and network architectures, and new programming models.
The £500,000 High Performance Computer (HPC) will help the University’s Faculty of Engineering and Institute for Complex Systems tackle some of the most challenging engineering problems, from re-imagining aeroplane design for the best fuel efficiency to working out how to store hydrogen in nanoporous materials.
CSIRO Computational and Simulation Science leader, Dr John Taylor, said the Nvidia-based GPU technology gives the organisation the potential to deliver huge gains in computational efficiency, energy efficiency and scientific research.
