Interactive Supercomputing has been awarded a US government research grant to help speed up science and engineeing by developing easy to use desktop software for parallel computers.
The grant from Oak Ridge National Labs will be used to develop toolkits that parallelise the algorithms and models resulting from popular desktop technical computing software such as MATLAB, Python, R, and IDL, sometimes called Very High Level Language (VHLL) applications. The goal of the grants is to enable scientists and engineers to tap the parallel processing capabilities of high performance computers to solve huge computational problems, while minimising development time. ISC was selected for the project because of its experience in automatic parallelisation technology that bridges desktop environments to high performance computers.
The Oak Ridge National Labs project, called ‘Towards a scientific data analysis platform for high level language application codes on high performance computers,’ will explore where it is best to parallelise codes written in a VHLL. Potential applications for this research include climate modelling, nanotechnology, biology and modelling fusion reactions. Codes written by the Lab staff will be analysed to identify their scalability in terms of problem size and processor count. The project will use ISC’s Star-P software as the testing platform, and run existing mathematical libraries and solvers on the servers, accessing them from a VHLL on the desktop.
'Considering the growing importance of parallel computing architectures, as well as the scientific reach of the Oak Ridge National Labs, this research should have a big impact in many areas of science, such as clean energy, environmental protection and national security,' said Eckart Jansen, vice president of advanced development at ISC.
