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ISR's High Performance Computing & Networking Workshop
From: David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>
Date: Wed, 8 Sep 1993 04:41:26 -0500
From: Dr. David K. Kahaner US Office of Naval Research Asia (From outside US): 23-17, 7-chome, Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo 106 Japan (From within US): Unit 45002, APO AP 96337-0007 Tel: +81 3 3401-8924, Fax: +81 3 3403-9670 Email: kahaner () cs titech ac jp Re: ISR 1993 Workshop 8 Sept 1993 This file is named "isr.93" ABSTRACT. ISR's High Performance Computing & Networking Workshop, Tsukuba Japan 8/93. ISR, originally called the Institute of Supercomputing Research, when it was part of the Recruit company, has had a research lab in Tokyo for several years. Several Western scientists have been involved in collaborative research there, for example, Dr. H.Wasserman from Los Alamos, and others. ISR also published the Vector Register, a useful newsletter of activities in Japanese high performance computing. In addition, ISR has had well received annual workshops on high performance computing for the past five years (see for example, "workshop.isr", 27 Sept 1990). However, Recruit has decided that high performance computing does not fit with their other business interests and during the past year the facility has been transformed into a multimedia development center. ISR's Director, Dr. Raul Mendez, has recreated ISR as a private organization, International Systems Research, without ties to Recruit. In this activity he is joined on the US side, by Mr. Craig Lund, who runs Local Knowledge from Durham NH. Their initial activities will be associated with system integration, with particular interest in the short term, on the 11 supercomputer systems that are to be purchased and installed by April 1994 at Japanese government laboratories as part of the economic stimulus package. For information about ISR, contact ISR Villa Pinedo 103 Akasaka, Minato-Ku Tokyo 107 Japan Tel: +81 3 3423-9509; Fax: +81 3 3423-0979 Last month, ISR ran its annual workshop, in Tsukuba. But in keeping with the new organization's charter, the emphasis was on bringing users and potential users together with vendors. As distinguished from past ISR workshops, this was a not a research forum. Instead, six speakers gave tutorial, or overview talks. In addition, there was a small exhibition, with five vendors represented, NEC, Cannon-KSR, IBM, HP, and Matsushita-Parsytec. (From the Japanese side, it was very interesting to see NEC's material on the Cenju-3, a multi-stage net connected parallel machine with up to 256 50MFLOP VR4400SC processors.) The workshop was also co-sponsored by the Ministry of Education's Science in Education Research Foundation. Supporting organizations included the US Embassy and the journal Parallelogram. Approximately 100 actual participants (excluding vendors) were present, and ISR did a good job of getting representation from all the 11 government sites planning supercomputer purchases. In past years, a large conference and exhibition, Japan Supercomputing 199x, was held, but the 1993 conference was cancelled and I am told that the planned 1994 conference is also likely to be similarly cancelled due to high costs. Thus the ISR workshop was one of the few opportunities for potential users to come together and hear about systems. Although there were a few participants who were very well versed in supercomputing, many were clearly here to learn, and in that sense they were well served and the workshop should be deemed a success. Below I have included summary material on the Japanese presentations. (Two presentations, in English, were overviews of activities in the US on clustered workstations and High Performance Fortran.) Of these, the most interesting for me, and perhaps for Western readers, was the overview of NTT's networking and service strategy, called by the company VI&P (Visual, Intelligent and Personal Communications). This is related to applications of ISDN. As I have written on this topic several times before, here I will only summarize the latest activities, what NTT calls Phase II. (For associated material, both narrow and broad band ISDN, see the reports, "j-comm.93" 5 Sept 1993, "isdn.93", 25 Feb 1993, and "isdn.92" 6 May 1992.) At the ISR workshop, the NTT presentation was made by Dr Mitsuru Miyauchi Senior Research Engineer, Supervisor Network Integration Laboratory NTT Telecommunication Networks Lab 1-2356, Taki, Yokosuka-shi Kanagawa-ken 238-03 Japan Tel: +81 468-59-3180; Fax: +81 468-59-2546 Email: MIYAUCHI () NTTMHS NTT JP Since April 1991, NTT has been conducting comprehensive experiments related to VI&P (Visual, Intelligent and Personal communication services), NTT's service vision for the 21st century at its company's laboratories. B-ISDN and FTTH (Fiber to The Home) are important and basic items for the VI&P concepts, and are being developed in the NTT laboratories. Existing ISDN experiments at NTT have focused on optimizing the use of current N-ISDN (called by NTT, INS-Net). Beginning this fiscal year, the company is concentrating on experiments for new services and applications for the time when higher bandwidth becomes available. This summer, NTT released information about their work in two general areas, (1) multi-media and (2) high-speed computer communications. (1) Multi-media. NTT's Yokosuka R&D center (about one hour south of Tokyo) is connected by an optical subscriber transmission system to a "house" about 4km away. The system can multiplex-transmit data at speeds of several Mbps up to several hundred Mbps on a single optical fiber. The environment in the house is supposed to simulate a real home or office situation, so in addition to sophisticated issues, NTT is also studying optical fiber cable wiring questions such as the installation of optical cables, mainly applied indoor. NTT plans to install FTTH (Fiber To The Home) by year 2015 in Japan. Experiments in the house are related to simultaneous use of multi-services and applications of super-high-definition, (SHD) (see below) images. Specific applications include electronic newspaper transmission, and transmission of photomicrographs of cellular tissues or X-ray data for medical diagnosis. Experiments related to simultaneous multiple services involve the use of a video telephone and 60 channels of TV (including some HDTV) on a single optical fiber using the optical subscriber transmission system mentioned above. SHD applications (see next paragraph) in the office are envisioned to include such things as fabric databases, high definition images from libraries and museums, CAD, etc. NTT's SHD (Super High Definition) is a system to transmit and display images with four time HDTV data capacity (claimed to be about the resolution of 35mm film). Using 150Mbps (B-ISDN) and this system, NTT can transmit a still image in less than one second. Using 600Mbps lines, a high-quality moving picture can be transmitted in real time. (2) High-speed computer communications. The Yokosuka R&D center is also connected to NTT's Musashino R&D center via ATM links connected to a 100km 2.4Gbps optical transmission line. (Musashino is west of Tokyo.) The centers will be also connected by analog NTSC and digital 156Mbps satellite links in 1993 and 1995 respectively. The idea is to study problems associated with various applications including latency and error effects. Within each center FDDI LANs are installed. There is also a supercomputer at Musashino which generates computer graphics image data sent to an HDTV quality display at Yokosuka. There are also multimedia system experiments such as PC-based multipoint desktop video conferencing using ATM-LAN developed at the NTT labs. Remark: Readers of my reports will doubtless get the impression that there is some disarray in Japan's activities with regard to ISDN. For example, the report "j-comm.93" 5 Sept 1993, suggests that financial pressures may retard the completion dates of the FTTH project. The Japanese economy is not nearly as strong as in the past, competition is intense within the communications industry, and there are many governmental "turf wars" -- nevertheless, forward progress is evident. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Simulation Supercomputer Center at National Institute for Fusion Science Kunihiko Watanabe, NIFS This talk described the newly created supercomputer center at the National Institute for Fusion Science in Nagoya. Their "Simulation Analysis System" is centered on an NEC SX-3 24R supercomputer that a small number of users share. (The decision to obtain this machine over a Cray caused front page headlines here several months ago.) The basic concept is to try to advance the understanding of fusion physics by increasing the computational resources dedicated to numerical simulation. The NIFS system is unique in several ways (even by Japanese standards). For instance, it is designed for handling 4GByte, 2-hour jobs in single user mode. Notable features of the system are its use of mass storage (1.5TByte, 10MByte/sec throughput) as disk space and its use of a 160Gbit RAID disk system as a buffer from which data is transferred to mass storage after job execution. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Amateur's Experiences on a Highly Parallel Computer, A Large Scale Numerical Simulation on AP-1000 (QCD-TARO Project). Atsushi Nakamura, Faculty of Education, Yamagata University This talk described the author's experience with parallel processing on the Fujitsu AP-1000, a distributed memory system based on the Sparc RISC chip. The AP-1000, a 2-D mesh (or more precisely a torus), is the parallel processor with the largest number of users in Japan and this talk was a kind of user's log of experiences porting QCD applications to the AP. The mapping from the physical domain to the topology of the AP as well as load balancing in QCD applications were discussed in detail. (TARO stands for Thousand cell Array processor for Omnipurposes.) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- The Emerging Workstation Cluster Craig Lund, ISR America, Durham NH ------------------------------------------------------------------------- HPF: Why, Where, and How Larry Meadows, The Portland Group, Wilsonville OR ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Benchmarking, Past, Present, and Future S. Sekiguchi, ETL, Tsukuba Japan This talk surveyed the performance of supercomputer systems. A review was first given of the various attempts at establishing a methodology for measuring performance. The author emphasized that benchmarks should be used for performance estimation or prediction when users purchase new machines or when designers develop new machines. Thus, one of the important features of a benchmark is that it must cover the perspectives of both applications and architectures. Of course, "performance" is supposed to be a function of computing something, and hence, once an application has been run, the output should contain the data necessary for evaluation. The PERFECT, NAS, SLALOM, SPLASH, Euroben, and several other benchmarks were discussed. These varied from the hierarchical approach, proceeding from simple vector operations, to kernels, advancing to subroutines, and reaching up to full application programs. There are mutual interactions among a benchmark's hierarchical levels. Sekiguchi also stated that MITI is planing to start an academic project for research on computers' performance modeling and its theory.
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