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HPC Network Interface Software/Hardware Co-Design

May 8, 2014

Date: Thursday, May 8, 2014
Time: 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Place: Mechanical Engineering 218

Ron Brightwell
Scalable System Software Department
Sandia National Laboratories

Scalable System Software Department Sandia National Laboratories 

The Portals project has entered a third decade of research and development in scalable, high-performance networking for large-scale scientific parallel computing systems. Portals has evolved from its inception as a component of early lightweight operating systems to become an important vehicle for interconnect exploration. Unlike most user-level network programming interfaces, Portals employs a building block approach that encapsulates the semantic requirements of a broad range of upper-level protocols needed to support high-performace computing applications and services. This approach has also enabled hardware designers to focus on developing components that accelerate key functions in Portals, facilitating the software/hardware co-design process. This talk will provide an overview of the latest version of the Portals interconnect API and describe research activities aimed at exploiting some recently added capabilities.

Bio: Ron Brightwell currently manages the Scalable System Software Department at Sandia National Laboratories. He joined Sandia in 1995 after receiving his BS in mathematics and his MS in computer science from Mississippi State University. While at Sandia, he has designed and developed software for lightweight compute node operating systems and high-performance networks on several large-scale massively parallel systems, including the Intel Paragon and TeraFLOPS, and the Cray T3 and XT series of machines. He has authored more than 75 peer-reviewed journal, conference, and workshop publications. His research interests include high-performance, scalable communication interfaces and protocols for system area networks, operating systems for massively parallel processing machines, and parallel program performance analysis libraries and tools. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE and the ACM.

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