NEC Laboratory Reviews First Year of Cooperative Projects

By Special to HPCwire by Rolf Hempel & Christian Lantwin

October 6, 1995

  Sankt Augustin, Germany -- NEC C&C (Computers and Communication)
Research Laboratory at the GMD Technopark has wrapped up its first year
of operation.


  Established against the backdrop of an emerging European common market
and a focussing of NEC's activities in Europe, the C&C research lab
represents an impressive milestone as it completes its local operation,
which now reaches from research & development through production to
marketing and service.


  "NEC is pleased to have found GMD as a partner for setting up its
European research interests in parallel computing and high performance
networking," Dr. Nobuhiko Koike, general manager at NEC and head of NEC's
research laboratories in Europe reflects. "The great experience of GMD in
these areas and NEC's technological strength guarantee a fruitful and
satisfying co-operation for both parties."


  Although C&C is the first cooperative research lab NEC has developed in
Europe, the company has a history of activity in European high performance
computing.


 "Before coming to Europe, I have also been involved in research projects
carried out together with the supercomputing customers in Europe,
especially the CSCS in Switzerland," Koike explained.


  The new NEC SX-4 parallel vector supercomputer is also counted among the
results of these activities.


NUMERICAL SUPERCOMPUTING AT GMD'S SCAI INSTITUTE
  Parallel supercomputing has a long tradition at the GMD SCAI institute.
Under the directorship of Ulrich Trottenberg, research activities range
from parallel numerical algorithms (adaptive multigrid), through numerical
applications, such as computational fluid dynamics and weather prediction,
to the development of parallel programming interfaces (PARMACS and MPI)
and programming tools.


  At the institute's parallel computing lab, machines from various
hardware vendors offer a broad spectrum of architectures for the
development of portable and scalable software. Together with two other
national labs, KFA and DESY, GMD runs the High Performance Computing
Center HLRZ, providing supercomputing power as a national resource for
German academia and industry.


  In addition to its relationship with NEC, SCAI has a long-term
co-operation agreement with IBM. However, NEC is the first partner to
establish an independent research center on GMD premises. And this is only
the first step, as the recent opening of a second research group shows.
The new group plans to conduct research with GMD in Berlin on multimedia
communications and ATM networks.


  "We feel honored by NEC's decision to open their first research
institution in Europe at the GMD Technopark. We are working together in
parallel computing and applications programming," Trottenberg reflected.
"In our view, the first year of cooperation was very successful."


THE FIRST YEAR IN REVIEW
  NEC set up a 64 processor Cenju-3 machine at GMD's parallel computing
laboratory in September 1994. The first goal of the co-operative effort
was porting large-scale application codes to the new machine. Among the
codes were the European medium-range weather forecast program IFS as well
as the unified CFD code of the German aircraft industry FLOWer. All
application codes are based on the portable PARMACS message-passing
interface which has been implemented by PALLAS GmbH on the Cenju-3.


  Benchmarks have been carried out for all applications. They were
reported in a first joint publication which is to appear in Parallel
Computing. These efforts have been complemented by starting common basic
research activities, such as the development of a parallel conjugate
gradient algorithm, preconditioned by multigrid.


  To celebrate its first year, C&C is holding a workshop Oct. 11 and 12 to
review progress made through the cooperative effort.
(See HPCwire article 2951 "Conference Listings".)


-------------------
Christian Lantwin of NEC and Rolf Hempel
of GMD SCAI have worked with the NEC C&C Research
Laboratory.


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