The Power to See

I. Introduction

Historically, the role of High Performance Computing (HPC) has been seen as a distinctive, separate endeavor that did not touch the daily lives of most people. Activities in HPC and the results from HPC projects were limited to small numbers of highly trained specialists. The result of this has been that HPC, although having tremendous impact in some areas, has been greatly underappreciated and underutilized in our society.

Today we are immersed in the Digital Information Age. The ubiquitous presence of cell phones, pagers, digital sensors, visual monitors, etc., are a symbol of that. Also, the fact that most people today understand and appreciate the value of the World Wide Web, shows that the impact is wide spread. What is also remarkable, and why we specifically refer to this as the Digital Information Age, is that all of these devices can interact with each other by virtue of the underlying commonality of digital information encoding.

How does HPC fit in to the Digital Information Age? If we recognize that HPC plays a critical and unique role in creating valuable data, then we can see the tremendous potential for HPC as an essential component in the Digital Information Age. However, HPC must be integrated into today's information infrastructure through the information appliances that we have come to rely upon, e.g., web browsers, immersive environments, even pagers, cell phones and faxes. Ultimately this means is that high performance computing must be integrated with high performance data management and high performance graphics in order to deliver its greatest value.

II. Increasing the Demand for HPC

Before we continue with further discussion of HPC in the Digital Information Age, we must make it clear that emphasizing the connection of HPC to today's information infrastructure does not diminish the importance of HPC. In fact it is quite the opposite. By making HPC results readily accessible, the demand for HPC increases. Almost immediately, the ready accessibility to HPC results dramatically increases the demand for more accurate simulations and more rapid turn around of simulation results.

The Role of Computer Simulation

The role of computer simulation in science and engineering is to create valuable information about processes, product designs, etc. This observation may seem obvious once stated, but it does have significant implications. We must appreciate how unique and valuable the role of HPC can be. The data that computer simulation creates is often unattainable by any other means. For example, it is infeasible to design, build and crash hundreds of physical automobile prototypes prior to manufacturing next year's new vehicle. However, this is possible using computer simulation. In fact, not only can you create many virtual prototypes and answer questions like "How safe is this automobile design?", but you can also begin to ask the question "What automobile design is the safest?". This type of information is incredibly valuable and is unattainable by any other means. HPC uses simulation to solve problems that are too difficult, dangerous, or expensive to solve in any other way.

Advances in computer simulation applications now allow us to model many complex physical systems with a great deal of accuracy. However, in most engineering and scientific disciplines, we have only started to approach the sophistication we need. Several issues are limiting the value of HPC results. In particular, the accuracy of a model and the speed at which the model generates results are two important issues.

Physical Accuracy

The accuracy of a computer model, when compared to the actual physical process being modeled, provides the foundation for any scientific or engineering application. The usefulness of any application is ultimately determined by how accurate the underlying model is. For example, if we wish to use a computer model to determine if one product design is better than another, we must have confidence that our model is accurate enough to provide a reliable distinction between to the two designs.

Currently, in all engineering and scientific disciplines, we make many simplifying assumptions in our computer models in order to be able to generate cost-effective results on today's computers. Without exception, there is an insatiable hunger for more powerful computer systems.

Speed (Rapid Turn-Around)

In addition to providing accurate results, timeliness of generating the results is very important. Although any improvement in turn-around time is valuable, an exciting opportunity lies in the ability to run sophisticated computer models interactively.

As HPC results become more accessible through the Digital Information Infrastructure, the importance of increased physical accuracy and rapid turn-around of results will increase dramatically. Thus, by increasing our focus on making HPC more accessible, we simultaneously increase the demand for HPC. How will we make HPC results more accessible? This is the topic of the next section.

III. The Importance of Advanced User Interfaces

As we mentioned above, HPC is uniquely able to create valuable data that can in turn be used to generation information and insight into problems that impact our society today. Safer automobiles, more effective medications and a cleaner environment are some benefits that we already see resulting from HPC. However, in order to get information and insight from HPC data, we must have effective user interfaces.

Transforming Capability into Usability

As computer models become more complex and detailed, the role of the user interface becomes much more important. State-of-the-art simulations can generate gigabytes, terabytes, and soon petabytes of data. The latent information in this data must be extracted in a way that is meaningful to the user.

The role of user interfaces is to transform capability into usability. Traditionally, HPC applications have had complicated user interfaces that require substantial training and education in order to use them effectively. This fact necessarily limits the usefulness of HPC to a small number of highly trained specialists. However, this is changing.

The Role of Multimedia

In the past few years we have seen tremendous progress in the use of graphics and visualization. In addition, the astonishing emergence of the World Wide Web as a vehicle for transmitting information has completely change how we write user interfaces. These recent advances offer tremendous promise in making HPC more accessible. The combination of realistic, 3D graphics and easy-to-write web interfaces gives us a potent capability to provide intuitive, interactive and immersive user environments, or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, allows us to potentially feed the results of an HPC simulation directly into a spreadsheet computation.

Importance of High Performance Data Management

In addition to graphics and web tools, advanced user interfaces require sophisticated, high performance data management. Users can and will quickly generate volumes of data that must be managed and accessed. Having both the hardware and software capabilities to handle these demands is essential to making HPC successful in the Digital Information Age.

IV. Highly Integrated Computing

In the previous sections we demonstrated that, in order for HPC to be successful in the Digital Information Age, HPC computer systems must have state-of-the-art graphics, networking capabilities and data management--in addition to high performance computing capabilities. However, today graphics, data management and computer simulation are usually distinct functions of separate systems. Because of this, we typically buy a separate computer system to handle each function and measure the value of an HPC computer system by how cost-effective it is in running a particular set of scientific/engineering applications. In fact, as the capabilities of different HPC platforms converge, the focus turns almost solely to price/performance, i.e., how cheaply can a particular computer system produce a particular, predetermined result.

Although price/performance is extremely important, we have a new opportunity to improve the value of HPC by increasing the benefit it provides. In particular, if we combine graphics, data management and computing into a single high performance system, we open up new opportunities to greatly increase the benefit of HPC.

Computer systems like the Silicon Graphics Origin Family represent an exciting advance in HPC. A follow-on to the Silicon Graphics Power Challenge, Origin is the only HPC system with advanced graphics, data handling, and high performance computing capabilities in the same system frame. The design offers a real opportunity for us to make tremendous strides in bringing the power of HPC to bear on important problems, and has potential to make the results of HPC available to a broad audience like never before.

V. Examples

Although much of what we have presented here is forward-looking, we do have several compelling examples that demonstrate our vision. We discuss a few of these below.

HyperTrace

HyperTrace(tm) is a high-performance post-processing environment for computational fluid dynamics modeling. In its most elaborate form, it is a 3D stereo, immersive and interactive environment which allows users to get tremendous insight into their flow field problems. By putting thousands of particle traces in motion, one is able to see dynamic flow features that were previously undetectable. A simple demonstration can be seen here.

Virtual Plant

Virtual Plant enables the linking of dynamic process simulation to a 3D walk-through plant environment. Because the interface is an actual 3D pictorial representation of the plant, access to and understanding of plant simulation data is extremely efficient and intuitive. This environment removes the hurdles associated with standard interfaces and allows a well-trained process engineer to use computer tools without being a computer expert. A simple demonstration can be seen here.

Virtual Proving Ground

Virtual Proving Ground is an effort to use extremely intensive numerical simulation to gain insight into the road handling capabilities of future automobile designs. By using explicit finite element analysis applications (using the same applications that are 9 currently used for crash analysis), we are able to simulate the road response of a vehicle design as it drives down the highway. This simulation requires one to two orders of magnitude more computing capability than standard computations, but offers tremendous potential for getting new insight into automotive design. A movie of one such simulation is here.

VI. The Future

The future of HPC can and will be very bright. Without a doubt, HPC can play an essential and unique role in curing disease, designing innovative and safer products, and protecting and enhancing our environment. However, to get the most value from HPC we must make the information it provides, which is truly unique, readily accessible to people who can use it. By focusing on how HPC simulation data is managed and presented to the user, in addition to continued focus on more sophisticated computer models, we can bring to the value of HPC to a broad audience. To the extent we do this, HPC will be seen as essential tool that can be brought to bear on the most challenging problems facing our society today. In order to do this most effectively we must look to the next generation of computer systems, like the SGI Origin Family, that integrate high performance computing, data management and graphics into a single system. These systems provide a tremendous opportunity to make qualitative advances in the use of HPC as we go forward.

Author Biography

Dr. Heroux is member of the Strategic Applications Group at Silicon Graphics/Cray Research. His primary focus is on the design and implementation of next generation HPC applications technology.

mike.heroux@innovation.cray.com
http://www.cray.com