Overview of ESS Testbed Facilities

Objectives: The goal of the ESS testbeds activity is to assure that the development of high-end scalable computer systems evolve in a direction leading to sustainable teraFLOPS for ESS applications. The objectives are to:

• Develop metrics for comparing and evaluating scalable parallel systems that measure their completeness and balance in light of ESS applications and that can be used to evaluate systems proposed in cooperative agreement notices to enable NASA to reach the sustainable teraFLOPS goal.
• Provide useful feedback to the system vendors as to the effectiveness and limitations of their products for performing ESS Grand Challenge applications in such a form that will help them to improve subsequent generations.

Strategy and Approach: Access to a wide variety of large scalable testbeds is required to stimulate the ESS Investigators to develop portable Grand Challenge applications and testcase codes. These applications will serve as the source of a representative mix of parallel computational techniques and implementations. Once these problems are formulated on particular parallel architectures and have begun to stabilize into useful tools for the Investigators, they are examined by project personnel to identify key computational kernel and data movement components. They are then recast in ways that make them portable to other scalable systems and instrumented so as to report important values during execution. The components are selected to cover and link the features of the architecture that make a significant contribution to end-to-end speed of execution. In this form, the key components are being run on different scalable systems as a suite of ESS parallel benchmarks that measure the performance envelope of each system. Access to preproduction and early serial number machines enables this activity to perform a pathfinder function.

Both GSFC and JPL manage and operate ESS-owned testbeds onsite. JPL provides support to ESS Investigators for the Intel Paragon at Caltech. In addition, GSFC has entered into a variety of arrangements with institutions which own large scalable testbeds. Some of these arrangements involve the exchange of NASA funds for machine access and user support. The GSFC Evaluation Coordinator has identified early parallel codes to form the ESS parallel benchmark working set.

Status/Plan: At GSFC, a Deputy Project Manager for Testbeds directs the inhouse testbed activities and coordinates arrangements with other institutions for testbed access. At JPL, a Deputy Task Leader directs the inhouse testbed activity and access to the Intel Delta. The Evaluation Coordinator reports to the ESS Project Manager.

Points of Contact:

Lisa Hamet
Goddard Space Flight Center
hamet@nibbles.gsfc.nasa.gov
301-286-9417

Juliana Murphy
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
julie@olympic.jpl.nasa.gov
818-354-7311