The TOPS consortium will conduct algorithmic research on optimal solution methods for simulations based on partial differential equations, create software, and provide consulting on its use throughout the DOE national laboratory complex.
Established as part of DOE's 2001 line-item initiative "Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing," the "Integrated Software Infrastructure Center" (ISIC) is one of only seven created around the country. The Center focuses on developing and implementing algorithms and supporting scientific investigations performed by the DOE. Simulations of importance often involve the solution of partial differential equations on terascale computers - those capable of performing more than a trillion calculations per second. The TOPS Center will research, develop, and deploy an integrated toolkit of open-source, optimal complexity solvers for the nonlinear partial differential equations that arise in many DOE application areas, including fusion, accelerator design, global climate change, and reactive chemistry. The algorithms created as part of this project will aim to reduce current computational bottlenecks by orders of magnitude on terascale computers, enabling scientific simulation on a scale heretofore impossible.
In many areas of science, physical experimentation is impossible, such as with cosmology; dangerous, as with manipulating the climate; or simply expensive, as with fusion reactor design. It is hoped that large-scale simulation will give scientists insight and confirmation of existing theories in such areas, without benefit of full experimental verification. The codes used for such simulations may be checked against experiment in a variety of well understood laboratory contexts to validate them. Along with usability, robustness, and algorithmic efficiency, an important goal of this ISIC will be to attain the highest possible computational performance in its implementations by accommodating to the memory bandwidth limitations of hierarchical memory architectures. Today's high-end computers, such as the world's most powerful unclassified 4-Teraflop machine at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, designed by IBM, are one-of-a-kind, and come without all of the scientific software libraries that scientists expect to find on desktop workstations.
Extraordinary advances in computing technology in the past decade have set the stage for a major advance in scientific computing. Within the next five to ten years, computers another thousand times faster than today's computers will become available. These advances herald a new era in scientific computing - if they can be harnessed with scalable algorithms and software. To exploit this opportunity, these computing advances must be translated into corresponding increases in the performance of the scientific codes used to model physical, chemical, and biological systems. This is a daunting problem. Current advances in computing technology are being driven by market forces in the commercial sector, not by scientific computing. Harnessing commercial computing technology for scientific research poses problems unlike those encountered in previous supercomputers, in magnitude as well as in kind. These problems will be solved only with increased investments in computer software - in research and development on scientific simulation codes as well as on the mathematical and systems software that underlie these codes.
TOPS Philosophy links you to a 4-page pdf file that provides a more technical overview of the need for and philosophy behind the TOPS project.