DURIP: High-Performance Many-Core Clusters for Modeling and Simulation

Principal Investigator: Ming Lin, Dinesh Manocha
Funding Agency: U.S. Army Research Office
Agency Number: W911NF-08-1-0480

Abstract
We are requesting equipment to support development of desktop and portable high-performance clusters of multi-core and many-core processors for modeling and simulation. They will be used for interactive display and interaction with massive datasets, computer-generated forces, real-time ray tracing for RFpropagation and physically-based simulation. In particular, we propose to acquire: • Ten high-end, multi-core workstations with high-end graphics processors and giga-bytes of memory. This would provide us a high performance platform of 80 cores altogether. • Ten mobile workstations with multi-core CPUs and high-end portable graphics card. This would provide a portable platform with 20 cores. • High-resolution displays. • High speed inter-connect technologies. We would use these workstations to develop two HPC clusters: desktop and mobile. These clusters would be used for our Army and DoD funded research on modeling, simulation, and handling of complex datasets. We would also develop scalable algorithms for line-of-sight, ray tracing, route planning and collision avoidance algorithms on these clusters and evaluate their performance within OneSAF simulation systems as well as RF propagation. The major research projects supported by this equipment are: • Computer-generated force simulation systems • Physically-based simulation • Real-time ray tracing for visual, aural and RF propagation • High-resolution displays • Real-time walkthroughs of CAD and Urban Environments We are also closely collaborating with many DOD research labs (including ARL, PEO STRI and RDECOM) and transferring some of the algorithmic and software technology developed as part of these research projects. The requested instrumentation will provide a major upgrade to our current facilities and is also critical for our collaboration and technology transfer to DOD labs and organizations. The equipment will be actively used by more than 15 faculty members from Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, etc. and 75 graduate students. Some of this equipment will also be made available for classroom instruction and shared research laboratories.