OVERCOMING COMMUNICATION LATENCY BARRIERS IN MASSIVELY PARALLEL SCIENTIFIC COMPUTATION

RO Dror and JP Grossman and KM Mackenzie and B Towles and E Chow and JK Salmon and C Young and JA Bank and B Batson and MM Deneroff and JS Kuskin and RH Larson and MA Moraes and DE Shaw, IEEE MICRO, 31, 8-19 (2011).

DOI: 10.1109/MM.2011.38

Anton, a massively parallel special-purpose machine that accelerates molecular dynamics simulations by orders of magnitude, uses a combination of specialized hardware mechanisms and restructured software algorithms to reduce and hide communication latency. Anton delivers end- to-end internode latency significantly lower than any other large-scale parallel machine, and its critical-path communication time for molecular dynamics simulations is less than 3 percent that of the next-fastest platform.

Return to Publications page