Approach: On January 3, 1994, a Cray T3D MPP system was delivered to JPL. This system was procured under a collaborative agreement between Caltech/JPL and Cray Research, Inc.(CRI). NASA offices sponsoring this system are the Office of Space Sciences, Mission to Plant Earth and Aeronautics. Caltech campus/JPL and CRI have defined a partnership under the Parallel Applications Technology Program (PATP) to evaluate the new Cray T3D. CRI takes advantage of Caltech campus/JPL MPP experience to help rapidly increase the number of applications running on the Cray T3D. Caltech/JPL benefits from PATP through early access to the Cray T3D hardware/software on a cost-shared basis and by having additional on-site CRI technical applications experts.
Approximately 25 projects have been identified at Caltech campus/JPL as official collaborations in the PATP. The range of the identified projects spans visualization, ocean/atmospheric modeling, spacecraft design and electromagnetics. In addition, PATP collaborators plan to develop software tools and documentation for the MPP environment which will ease the use of these systems.
The Cray T3D system consists of 256 processing elements (PEs) with 64 megabytes of memory per PE for a total of 16 gigabytes of memory. Each processor is capable of performing at 150 megaflops for a peak system speed of 38 gigaflops.
Accomplishments: One of the first JPL projects to run on the new Cray T3D system was the code to do remote interactive exploration of large scientific datasets. JPL developed a ray-identification algorithm for parallel 3-D perspective rendering which can optionally control the viewpoint and display results over high bandwidth networks. The algorithmic approach was specifically designed to be scalable to very large datasets (multi-gigabyte) and large parallel machines (hundreds of nodes) with good production efficiency. Large MARS and US datasets have been used to demonstrate this code. This code was also enhanced to process the SAR data. Other Caltech/JPL applications which have successfully run on the T3D include electromagnetic simulations for the design of communications antennas, studying the dynamics of chemical reactions, examining the flow of space plasmas, computational fluid dynamics, and ocean modeling.
Significance: Caltech/JPL will provide feedback from its experiences using the Cray T3D to CRI to enhance its hardware/software, thus contributing to maintaining US leadership in supercomputing. The applications running on the T3D will help address the grand challenges of Earth and Space Sciences in the analysis of the enormous sets of data from NASA's earth and planetary missions.
Status/Plans: The memory was upgraded to 64 megabytes per PE for a total of 16 gigabytes of memory. The memory upgrade was an on-site replacement of memory boards within the Cray T3D system. With the additional memory per PE, the input/output of data was reduced which resulted in near real-time analysis of datasets. Currently defined collaboration projects will continue to enhance their applications running on the Cray T3D and new collaboration projects will be defined. Caltech campus/JPL will provide feed back to CRI to enhance its current/future MPP systems.
Point of Contact:
Larry Eversole
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
eversole@voyager.jpl.nasa.gov
(818) 354-2786