An Application Perspective on High-Performance Computing and Communications

We review possible and probable industrial applications of HPCC focusing on the software and hardware issues. Thirty-three separate categories are illustrated by detailed descriptions of five areas -- computational chemistry; Monte Carlo methods from physics to economics; manufacturing; and computational fluid dynamics; command and control; or crisis management; and multimedia services to client computers and settop boxes. The hardware varies from tightly-coupled parallel supercomputers to heterogeneous distributed systems. The software models span HPF and data parallelism, to distributed information systems and object/data flow parallelism on the Web. We find that in each case, it is reasonably clear that HPCC works in principle, and postulate that this knowledge can be used in a new generation of software infrastructure based on the WebWindows approach, and discussed in an accompanying paper

High resolution simulations of freely decaying shallow water turbulence on a rotating sphere

Results of high-resolution, long-time numerical integrations of the unforced shallow-water equations on a rotating sphere are presented. A new accurate and efficient grid point method is used for these simulations, that allows to easily reach very high spatial resolutions (up to an equivalent T680 spectral truncation). It is found that, for small values of the Rossby deformation radius LD, the final quasi-steady states of the free evolution are characterized by the formation of robust westward (retrograde) equatorial jets, whose strengths and widths depend on LD and on the rotation speed. It is also shown that the presence of a westward equatorial jet is related to the global prevalence of anticyclonic vorticity

A Scalable Implementation of Fault Tolerance for Massively Parallel Systems

For massively parallel systems, the probability of cr s~Yslenc failure clue to u random hardware fault becomes statistically very significant because of the huge number of components. Besides, filult injection experiments show that multiple failures go undetected, leading to incorrect results. Hence, massively parallel systems reguirc abilities to tolerate: these faults that will occur. The FTMPS project presents a scalable implementation to integrate the different steps to,laull tolerance into existing HPC systems . On the initial parallel .system only 4017v of (randomly injected),faulls do not cause the application to crash or produce wrong results . 1n. the resulting FTMPS prototype more than. 80%, of these ftiults are correctly detected and recovered. Resulting overhead for the application is only between 10 and 20%. Evaluation. of the different, co-operating fault tolerance modules shows the,llexibility and the ,.scalability of the approach.This project is partly sponsored by ESPRIT project 6731 (FTMPS): "Fault Tolerance in Massively Parallel Systems" . Geert Deconinck and Johan Vounckx have a grant from the Flemish Institute for the Advancement of Scientific and Technological Research in Industry (IWT). Rudy Lauwereins is a Senior Research Associate of the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research