Professor Khanna awarded NSF grant under the American Recovery  

This proposal is about exploring the use of alternative technologies,  
such as the Sony Playstation 3 gaming console, multimedia workstations  
and similar hardware for scientific computing. The key aspect of these  
technologies is that they use a processor that is based on a hybrid  
approach -- using elements from both traditional CPUs and GPUs. If  
successful, this approach would yield a significantly higher cost  
effectiveness (measured as performance-per-dollar and performance-per-
watt) compared with traditional Beowulf compute clusters. More  
specifically, the project will focus on investigating the performance  
of such hardware for projects in numerical relativity and (LIGO) data  
analysis. Preliminary work that has been performed in this direction  
by the PI has yielded very promising results. If such clusters yield  
these benefits, searches of LIGO data and simulations of gravitational  
wave sources could move into compute intensive regimes not now possible.


Author: JP Hsu [Contact]
Date: 8-9-2009