DR. L. A. DRUMMOND
National Energy Research Scientific Computer Center
(NERSC)
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Berkeley, CA
LADrummond@lbl.gov

Applications of Parallel Computers

We motivate high performance computing by showing that numerical experiments are becoming a third pillar of the scientific method, complementing theory (because many phenomena are too complicated to understand theoretically) and conventional experiments (because many phenomena or devices are too difficult, expensive, slow or dangerous to measure or prototype in the laboratory). Second, we motivate the need for parallelism, by showing that despite the exponentially increasing power of serial processors over time, using many of them in parallel is essential to solve very large problems. Some trends in high performance computing are discussed with data from the TOP500 list. We take a look at tools in the DOE ACTS Collection (http:acts.nersc.gov) that provide a variety of software solutions for tackling grand computational challenges and fast prototyping of scientific codes.