Dennis Fitzgerald

Architectural Design and Complexity Analysis of Large-Scale Cortical Simulation on a Hybrid Computing Platform

Research and development in modeling and simulation of human cognizance functions requires a high-performance computing platform for manipulating large-scale mathematical models. Traditional computing architectures cannot fulfill the attendant needs in terms of arithmetic computation and communication bandwidth. In this work, we propose a novel hybrid computing architecture for the simulation and evaluation of large-scale associative neural memory models. The proposed architecture achieves very high computing and communication performances by combining the technologies of hardware-accelerated computing, parallel distributed data operation and the publish/subscribe protocol. Analysis has been done on the computation and data bandwidth demands for implementing a large-scale brain-state-in-a-box (BSB) model. Compared to the traditional computing architecture, the proposed architecture can achieve at least 100X speedup.

Parallelizing a multi-frame blind deconvolution algorithm on clusters of multicore processors

The parallelization strategy of the Physically-Constrained Iterative Deconvolution (PCID) algorithm is being altered and optimized to enhance performance on emerging multi-core architectures. This paper reports results from porting PCID to multi-core architectures including the JAWS supercomputer at the Maui HPC Center (60 TFLOPS of dual-dual Xeon® nodes) and the Cell Cluster at AFRL in Rome, NY (52 TFLOPS of Playstation 3® nodes with IBM Cell Broadband Engine® multi-cores and 14 dual-quad Xeon headnodes). For 512×512 image sizes FFT performance exceeding 60 GFLOPS has been observed on dual-quad Xeon nodes. Multi-core architectures programmed with multiple threads delivered significantly better performance for parallelization of the low level image convolution operations compared to earlier parallelization across cluster nodes with MPI. Another focus of the PCID multi-core effort was to move from MPI message passing to a publish-subscribe-query approach to information management. The publish, subscribe and query infrastructure was optimized for large scale machines, such as JAWS, and features a “loose coupling“ of publishers to subscribers through intervening brokers. This change makes runs on large HPCs with thousands of intercommunicating cores more flexible and more fault tolerant.

Dependable embedded software through FPGA based emulation

This paper discusses the use of FPGA based emulation of embedded systems using the component level VHDL modules. The construction of an emulation board offers greater visibility of embedded signals and the ability to augment the circuitry with specialized debugging capabilities unavailable in the final hardware.