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Introduction
The Scalable Systems Laboratory is a research laboratory in the Computer
Science Department at the University of New Mexico. The Laboratory
also enjoys a close affiliation with the Albuquerque
High Performance Computing Center at the University of New Mexico and
the Scalable Computing
Systems Department at Sandia National Laboratories.
The goal of the Scalable Systems Laboratory is to develop approaches
for the design and implementation of large-scale, high-performance computing
systems for resource constrained (Grand Challenge) applications. The approaches
considered will be driven by the measurable needs of resource constrained
applications.
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Our goal is to provide an execution environment for resource constrained
applications.
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We define success by our ability to deliver 90% of the available resources
to the application (e.g., 90% of the physical memory, 90% of the available
communication bandwidth)
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Our current focus is on building very large computing systems from commodity
components.
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To be able to take advantage of the delivered resources, applications must
see easily predictable performance (e.g., message passing latencies) so
they can be tuned for the environment.
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Our approach is to minimize the services that are required and to make
as many services optional as possible. That is, whenever a service can
be moved to an application level library, without a significant performance
or security penalty, we will prefer that approach. An alternative is to
consider dynamic services that are migrated into and out of the lower levels
as needed (this is tricky, because it may introduce unpredictable behavior
into the application).
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The challenge associated with using commodity components is the conflict
between the intended use of the component and our planned use of the component.
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