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NERSC 3 Greenbook

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Access site:

From the 1993 Report ``Requirements for Supercomputing in Energy Research: The Transition to Massive Parallel Computing'' there are at least six key areas of Energy Research that have computational problems that require 100-500 gigaFLOPS computing systems along with substantial needs for main memory and mass storage. These problems need ``capability computing'' and the needs are not met with the abilities of the clusters of workstations, or the compute servers, or the aggregate local site described above. At the turn of the century, local and wide area bandwidths and software technology will be lacking. The computing system at the access center would need to be at the cutting edge to fulfill the needs of ER. Such systems probably would not have robust software. However, the development of code for the teraFLOPS system would be done on the workstations/symmetric multiprocessors using the highly tuned workstation environment and cross-compilers. The access site exists to provide ``capability computing'' - optimized for the computationally intensive major projects of the caliber of the Grand and National Challenges like the DOE's Numerical Tokamak Project, Global Climate Change simulations, combustion and other reactive flow modeling, materials by design, environmental chemistry applications, Genome data base searches, and simulated flow of oil and ground water. Projects will qualify to use the access center if they require more than about 30 gigaFLOPS or have restrictions on wall clock production time or need a main memory of 100 gigawords to compute efficiently.

The access site may exist because of its leading edge mass storage capabilities as much as its housing the state of the art computing system; this issue will be especially important until there is a substantial change in the high performance data storage technology and the bandwidth to the storage system. Additionally, the access site could be a site for research and development of prototypes for mass storage technology, graphics/visualization, virtual reality apparatus, and other techniques for the information infrastructure - all in collaboration with the information industries.

NERSC 3 Greenbook

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