Project 38 is a set of vendor-agnostic architectural explorations involving the Department of Defense (DOD), the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science, and DOE National Nuclear Security Administration. The near-term goal is to quantify the performance value and identify the potential costs of specific architectural concepts against a limited set of applications of interest to both the DOE and DOD. In the long-term, the project will develop an enduring capability for DOE and DOD to explore architectural innovations and quantify their value jointly. Contact: John Shalf

The project goal is to demonstrate the performance potential of purpose-built architectures as a potential future for HPC applications in the absence of Moore’s Law. Our approach is to reformulate the LS3DF algorithm to make it amenable to specialized hardware and to develop a custom accelerator for Density Functional Theory. The initial design/prototype will target an FPGA, and results will also be projected to an ASIC. Later, we intend to generalize our results to broader implications for DOE HPC workload. The impact of this project is to determine the feasibility of this approach for future DOE HPC. Doru (Thom) Popovici, John Shalf

A fundamental rethinking of computer architectures that can revitalize performance growth trends in computing capabilities is long overdue. Currently, there is a renewed interest in developing specialized hardware components. However, this approach will not resolve the fundamental data movement challenges that restrict the historical performance growth trends. The AGILE program will seed a new generation of computers with unprecedented pathways for continuing performance gains for the Intelligence Community. New architectures developed under the AGILE program will be driven by representative data-intensive applications through the co-design process. Co-design is a process for designing computer systems whereby the application requirements influence architecture decisions, and the architecture affects the design of the applications. Contact: George Michelogiannakis