Center for Adaptive Supercomputing Software-Multithreaded Architectures (CASS-MT)
World-leading solutions for improving the execution speed of irregular, data intensive applications
CASS-MT’s multithreaded supercomputer, Cray XMT, has the potential to substantially accelerate data analysis and predictive analytics for many complex challenges in energy, national security, and fundamental science that traditional computing cannot do.
CASS-MT is dedicated to research on systems software, programming environments, and applications in a High-Performance Computing (HPC) multithreaded architecture environment. We seek to create collaborations and provide expertise for using the Cray XMT systems and porting and optimizing applications. We achieve this by offering external and internal research partners access to our Cray XMT system at CASS-MT, the only center like it in the world.
CASS-MT is home to the only Open Science Cray XMT system consisting of 16 multithreaded processors, 128 GB RAM, and a 2.3-TB Lustre parallel filesystem.
Current challenges: Many applications are memory bound due to the increasing gap between memory and processor speeds. That is, the speed of the memory determines their performance. Slow memory speed prevents the processor from working while it waits for data to arrive.
An alternative type of architecture is required to process irregular, data intensive applications that have random memory access patterns.
Providing solutions: The new multithreaded architectures tolerate memory access latencies by switching context between threads. This means that the processors maintain multiple threads of execution and utilize hardware-based context switching to overlap the memory latency incurred by any thread with the computations from other threads.