“At the IEEE/ACM SC2000 conference on high-performance
networking and computing, The Aggregate research group at the
University of Kentucky was the only group to win two unrelated
awards. For its application work, the group was given a Gordon Bell
award (Honorable Mention in Price/Performance); for the
architecture of the KRAA Z-MP cluster supercomputer, the group
received an HPC Games award (Most Innovative Hardware).”
“Since 1987, the Gordon Bell Prizes have been awarded to
recognize outstanding achievements in high-performance computing.
Awards in the price/performance category are given to entries
demonstrating an outstanding price-performance ratio as measured in
dollars cost per million floating-point arithmetic operations per
second (MFLOPS) achieved while executing a genuine application. The
Kentucky team, Thomas Hauser, Tim Mattox, Ray LeBeau, Hank Dietz,
and George Huang, was given an Honorable Mention in
Price/Performance for its work “High-Cost CFD on a Low-Cost
Cluster.” CFD – Computational Fluid Dynamics – problems require
notoriously complex computations; the group achieved a record
price/performance of $1.86/MFLOPS simulating the airflow around a
turbine blade.”
“In large part, the outstanding price/performance on the CFD
application was due to two major advances in the design of the
supercomputer that ran the code: KLAT2, Kentucky Linux Athlon
Testbed 2. KLAT2 is a cluster supercomputer that unites sixty-four
700MHz AMD Athlon PCs. Each of the processors achieves
unusually high performance by using the 3DNow! instructions, which
were intended to speed-up multimedia games, to provide a similar
performance boost for the CFD arithmetic. The second advance
involves the way that the PCs interact; a deliberately asymmetric
Flat Neighborhood Network (FNN) built using multiple standard
100Mb/s Ethernets yields performance comparable to gigabit networks
at a small fraction of the cost. Earlier this year, these
technologies were responsible for KLAT2 becoming the first
supercomputer to run a standard application benchmark (ScaLAPACK)
with price/performance better than $1/MFLOPS.”