Karen A. Magerlein

Toward online, worldwide access to Vatican Library materials

The Vatican Library is an extraordinary repository of rare books and manuscripts. Among its 150,000 manuscripts are early copies of works by Aristotle, Dante, Euclid, Homer, and Virgil. Yet today access to the Library is limited. Because of the time and cost required to travel to Rome, only some 2000 scholars can afford to visit the Library each year. Through the Vatican Library Project, we are exploring the practicality of providing digital library services that extend access to portions of the Librarys collections to scholars worldwide, as an early example of providing digital library services that extend and complement traditional library services. A core goal of the project is to provide access via the Internet to some of the Librarys most valuable manuscripts, printed books, and other sources to a scholarly community around the world. A multinational, multidisciplinary team is addressing the technical challenges raised by that goal, including • Development of a multiserver system suitable for providing information to scholars worldwide. • Capture of images of the materials with faithful color and sufficient detail to support scholarly study. Protection of the on-line materials, especially images, from misappropriation. • Development of tools to enable scholars to locate desired materials. • Development of tools to enable scholars to scrutinize images of manuscripts. • In this paper, we provide an overview of the project, a description of the system being developed to satisfy its needs, and a discussion of how the technical challenges are being addressed.

Reducing Data Movement Costs: Scalable Seismic Imaging on Blue Gene

We present an optimized Blue Gene/P implementation of Reverse Time Migration, a seismic imaging algorithm widely used in the petroleum industry today. Our implementation is novel in that it uses large communication bandwidth and low latency to convert an embarrassingly parallel problem into one that can be efficiently solved using massive domain partitioning. The success of this seemingly counterintuitive approach is the result of several key aspects of the imaging problem, including very regular and local communication patterns, balanced compute and communication requirements, scratch data handling, multiple-pass approaches, and most importantly, the fact that partitioning the problem allows each sub-problem to fit in cache, dramatically increasing locality and bandwidth and reducing latency. This approach can be easily extended to next-generation imaging algorithms currently being developed. In this paper we present details of our implementation, including application-scaling results on Blue Gene/P.

Populating the Hermitage Museum's new web site

Experts from around the world tackle one of the most ambitious Web-based museum projects and the result captures the true artistry of teamwork, technology, and yes, art.

Multi-level parallel computing of reverse time migration for seismic imaging on blue Gene/Q

Blue Gene/Q (BG/Q) is an early representative of increasing scale and thread count that will characterize future HPC systems: large counts of nodes, cores, and threads; and a rich programming environment with many degrees of freedom in parallel computing optimization. So it is both a challenge and an opportunity to it to accelerate the seismic imaging applications to the unprecedented levels that will significantly advance the technologies for the oil and gas industry. In this work we aim to address two important questions: how HPC systems with high levels of scale and thread count will perform in real applications; and how systems with many degrees of freedom in parallel programming can be calibrated to achieve optimal performance. Based on BG/Qs architecture features and RTM workload characteristics, we developed massive domain partition, MPI , and SIMD Our detailed deep analyses in various aspects of optimization also provide valuable experience and insights into how can be utilized to facilitate the advance of seismic imaging technologies. Our BG/Q RTM solution achieved a 14.93x speedup over the BG/P implementation. Our multi-level parallelism strategies for Reverse Time Migration (RTM) seismic imaging computing on BG/Q provides an example of how HPC systems like BG/Q can accelerate applications to a new level.

Accelerating Computational Fluid Dynamics on the IBM Blue Gene/P Supercomputer

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is an increasingly important application domain for computational scientists. In this paper, we propose and analyze optimizations necessary to run CFD simulations consisting of multi-billion-cell mesh models on large processor systems. Our investigation leverages the general industrial Navier-Stokes open-source CFD application, Code_Saturne, developed by Electricité de France (EDF). Our work considers emerging processor features such as many-core, Symmetric Multi-threading (SMT), Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD), Transactional Memory, and Thread Level Speculation. Initially, we have targeted per-node performance improvements by reconstructing the code and data layouts to optimally use multiple threads. We present a general loop transformation that will enable the compiler to generate OpenMP threads effectively with minimal impact to overall code structure. A renumbering scheme for mesh faces is proposed to enhance thread-level parallelism and generally improve data locality. Performance results on IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer and Intel Xeon Westmere cluster are included.

Multiple threads and parallel challenges for large simulations to accelerate a general Navier–Stokes CFD code on massively parallel systems

Computational fluid dynamics is an increasingly important application domain for computational scientists. In this paper, we propose and analyze optimizations necessary to run CFD simulations consisting of multibillion‐cell mesh models on large processor systems. Our investigation leverages the general industrial Navier–Stokes CFD application, Code_Saturne, developed by Electricité de France for incompressible and nearly compressible flows. In this paper, we outline the main bottlenecks and challenges for massively parallel systems and emerging processor features such as many‐core, transactional memory, and thread level speculation. We also present an approach based on an octree search algorithm to facilitate the joining of mesh parts and to build complex larger unstructured meshes of several billion grid cells. We describe two parallel strategies of an algebraic multigrid solver and we detail how to introduce new levels of parallelism based on compiler directives with OpenMP, transactional memory and thread level speculation, for finite volume cell‐centered formulation and face‐based loops. A renumbering scheme for mesh faces is proposed to enhance thread‐level parallelism. Copyright