Overcoming Communication Latency Barriers in Massively Parallel Scientific Computation

Author

Dror, Ron O. ; Grossman, J.P. ; Mackenzie, Kenneth M. ; Towles, Brian ; Chow, Edmond ; Salmon, John K. ; Young, Cliff ; Bank, Joseph A. ; Batson, Brannon ; Deneroff, Martin M. ; Kuskin, Jeffrey S. ; Larson, Richard H. ; Moraes, Mark A. ; Shaw, David E.

Volume

31

Issue

3

fYear

2011

Firstpage

8

Lastpage

19

Abstract

Anton, a massively parallel special-purpose machine that accelerates molecular dynamics simulations by orders of magnitude, uses a combination of specialized hardware mechanisms and restructured software algorithms to reduce and hide communication latency. Anton delivers end-to-end internode latency significantly lower than any other large-scale parallel machine, and its critical-path communication time for molecular dynamics simulations is less than 3 percent that of the next-fastest platform.

Keywords

parallel machines; scientific information systems; Anton; critical-path communication time; end-to-end internode latency; hide communication latency; molecular dynamic simulation; parallel scientific computation; parallel special-purpose machine; restructured software algorithm; specialized hardware mechanism; Application software; Computational modeling; Hardware; Receivers; Synchronization; System-on-a-chip; Anton; Data communications; interprocessor communications; multiprocessor systems; network communication; parallel systems; special-purpose hardware;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Micro, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0272-1732

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/MM.2011.38

Filename

5765918