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1204.PR
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1993-05-03
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└
F
P└PUBLIC INFORMATION OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109. TELEPHONE (818) 354-5011
Hold For Release for July 4 and thereafter
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has announced the
inauguration of its Mark III Hypercube parallel
supercomputer.
The Mark III is the result of a five-year research
and development effort at the JPL Center for Space
Microelectronics Technology in collaboration with Dr.
Geoffrey Fox of the California Institute of Technology.
It represents the arrival of massively parallel
supercomputing.
The first module of the Mark III, which was placed
on-line on the Caltech computer network July 1, contains 32
nodes, or processing units, which together have a peak speed
of about 512 million floating point operations per second
(flops).
Three more 32-node modules will be added during the
next nine months to form a 128-node hypercube with each
single node having the power of 25 VAX minicomputers. The
peak speed of the 128-node Mark III is 2 billion floating
point operations per second. This performance makes it more
powerful than conventional supercomputers such as the Cray 2.
In addition to breaking the speed barrier, the
parallel hypercube is about 10 times more cost-effective than ▄j▄î
a conventional supercomputer because it is built with the
same low-cost, mass-produced Motorola 68020 microprocessors
and Weitek floating chips that are used in personal
computers.
Moreover, the hypercube architecture is scalable so
that a 10-fold performance increase can be obtained by
increasing the number of nodes by a factor of 10. New
massively parallel machines are envisioned that exceed
today's performance by a factor of 1,000.
The Mark III Hypercube is a joint endeavor of
Caltech and JPL scientists and engineers dating from 1983. It
is based on the pioneering work of Caltech computer scientist
Charles Seitz and physicist Geoffrey Fox who researched the
hypercube type of parallel computer architecture in the late
1970s and began construction of a laboratory prototype in
1980.
The Mark III is the third generation of hardware in
the Caltech/JPL Hypercube development. Four commercial firms
are now selling second-generation hypercube technology and
there are about 100 hypercube installations worldwide.
The Mark III Hypercube is operated by the Caltech
Concurrent Supercomputer facility, which is the first
supercomputer facility dedicated to massively parallel
machines. The facility also includes commercial parallel
computers made by Intel, NCUBE, Thinking Machines and Ametek.
Parallel computers are a solution to a fundamental
limit on the speed of single computers. Because of the finite ▄j▄î
speed of light, a single processor is limited as to its
ultimate speed.
Therefore, in order to achieve a major speedup in
problem solving, many single processors must be coordinated
to work simultaneously on a single large problem, just as
groups of workers subdivide the work and coordinate their
efforts to complete a task too large for a single worker.
To work efficiently on a problem, a parallel
computer must communicate its intermediate results among the
many individual processors. The layout of the communication
between the processors determines the "architecture" of the
computer. A hypercube characteristically has 2, 4, 8, 16,
etc., processors.
The Mark III Hypercube is being used for
scientific, engineering and defense research applications
such as:
- Study of the spin structure of liquid helium by
Michael Cross of Caltech.
- Structure of quark-quark interactions in the
proton by Geoffrey Fox of Caltech.
- Analysis of NASA multispectral space imaging data
by JPL scientist Jerry Solomon.
- Simulation of the strategic defense system led by
JPL's David Curkendall.
- Analysis of NASA synthetic aperture radar images
taken from the space shuttle by JPL's Jean Patterson.
The Mark III Hypercube research and development is ▄j▄î
sponsored by the U.S. Air Force Electronic Systems Division,
the Department of Energy and NASA.
#####
#1204
6/29/88 JJD