HIGH-SPEED NETWORKS, VISUALIZATION, AND MASSIVE PARALLELISM IN THE ADVANCED COMPUTING LABORATORY

Very high performance massively parallel machines are now available to solve significant problems for the nation that have been heretofore inaccessible. However, these machines, with their large memories are of little use for these problems without existing in an environment in which the scientist can perceive what is happening in the calculation and analyze the results effectively. This requires being able to transmit enormous amounts of data from these machines through very high performance networks in a way which is easily comprehended and manipulated by the scientist. In order to provide such an environment for these Grand Challenge applications, researchers in the Advanced Computing Laboratory have been developing a very high-speed network (100 Mbytes/s) based on the standard HIPPI protocol developed at Los Alamos. This is used to send data over a multiple cross bar network between supercomputers, high performance graphics machines, and high-speed framebuffers. Examples of scientific problems being explored in this way will be given, including approaches to high-speed archival data storage and interactive data exploration over these networks.