Several HPC applications developed at Georgia Tech will be ported and tuned to run on COBS in order to evaluate the sufficiency of the facilities provided. Two of the most complex applications are a molecular dynamics simulation and a global atmospheric climate model. Both are parallel applications written in C and have been developed in collaboration with scientists in the respective fields. The applications will be adapted to use the COBS OTL for their communication needs. We expect that the demands of these HPC applications will help us to understand and meet the needs of object-based high performance computing.
Other efforts at Georgia Tech are developing tools and systems to allow
scientists working on HPC applications such as those above to collaborate
online without the need to be physically colocated. In particular, multiple
scientists should be able to interact with and control an running HPC
application remotely as well as interact with each other through shared and
complimentary displays. This sort of interactive collaboration requires
high-speed and low latency multimedia communication capability as well as
sophisticated support for data sharing and interaction in a heterogeneous
environment. These are the design goals for COBS we will be examining the role
that COBS can play in the support of these distributed laboratories.