Per Aspera ad Astra: On the Way to Parallel Processing

Computational Science and Engineering is being established as a third category of scientific methodology; this innovative discipline supports and supplements the traditional categories: theory and experiment, in order to solve the problems arising from complex systems challenging science and technology. While the successes of the past two decades in scientific computing have been achieved essentially by the technical breakthrough of the vector-supercomputers, today the discussion about the future of supercomputing is focussed on massively parallel computers. The discrepancy, however, between peak performance and sustained performance achievable with algorithmic kernels, software packages, and real applications is still disappointingly high. An important issue are programming models. While Message Passing on parallel computers with distributed memory is the only efficient programming paradigm available today, from a user's point of view it is hard to imagine that this programming model, rather than Shared Virtual Memory, will be capable to serve as the central basis in order to bring computing on massively parallel systems from a sheer computer science trend to the technological breakthrough needed to deal with the large applications of the future; this is especially true for commercial applications where explicit programming the data communication via Message Passing may turn out to be a huge software-technological barrier which nobody might be willing to surmount.KFA Jülich is one of the largest big-science research centres in Europe; its scientific and engineering activities are ranging from fundamental research to applied science and technology. KFA's Central Institute for Applied Mathematics (ZAM) is running the large-scale computing facilities and network systems at KFA and is providing communication services, general-purpose and supercomputer capacity also to the HLRZ ("Höchstleistungsrechenzentrum") established in 1987 in order to further enhance and promote computational science in Germany. Thus, at KFA - and in particular enforced by ZAM - supercomputing has received high priority since more than ten years. What particle accelerators mean to experimental physics, supercomputers mean to Computational Science and Engineering: Supercomputers are the accelerators of theory

Lattice quantum hadrodynamics on a CRAY Y-MP

Quantum corrections to the mean-field equation of state for nuclear matter are estimated in a lattice simulation of quantum hadrodynamics on a CRAY Y-MP. In contrast with lattice quantum chromodynamics, where coordinate space methods are the standard, the calculations are carried out in momentum space and on nonhypercubic (irregular) lattices. The quantum corrections to the known, mean-field equation of state were found to be considerable. The time frame of the project and the large computational needs of the program required the use of powerful supercomputers, like the CRAY Y-MP, which are capable of performing at a very high computing speed by using both vector and parallel hardware, the latter being exploited by means of autotasking. The paper describes the applied analytical and the numerical methods as well as the changes needed for the program to be executed in parallel. After some code modifications a very efficient version could be obtained on a CRAY Y-MP8/832, leading to an overall performance of 2.13 gigaflops