FhGFS
Fraunhoher Virtual Machine
Raytracing
Phastgrid
PS Pro

The ITWM belongs to the pioneers concerning the application of PC clusters for industrial simulation problems. It is currently operating parallel systems with more than 1,000 CPUs for the development of parallel software and the solution of industrially relevant computation tasks.

Technological problems have stopped the continuous increase in performance by faster clock rates; dual core, quad core, and more are the current key words for a further increase. The parallelization of software has thus become a key technology in all IT relevant areas. Future efficient parallel software will have a hybrid structure, on the one hand making optimum use of multicore subsystems, and on the other hand scaling over many computers.

The new Cell Processor, which has been produced in cooperation by the companies IBM, Toshiba, and Sony and is working in the new PlayStation, is a prototype of this new generation of CPUs. In a strategic cooperation with IBM′s development laboratory in Böblingen, the CC HPC develops applications and analyzes the Cell platform with respect to its suitability as a HPC system. The IBM Cell Cluster, which has been installed at the ITWM in June 2008, made it into the Top500 with 1,120 cores, and even comes first place on the list of the most energy efficient systems (www.green500.org).

The extension of research activities in the field of multicore systems was one of the main subjects in the year 2008. The project activities of the CC HPC are currently divided into four fields:

Parallelization and performance analysis - seismic
The focus of activities in 2008 lay on the cooperation with our partners IBM and StatoilHydro. By combining fundamental HPC know-how and practical knowledge, the CC HPC has succeeded in developing particularly high-performance codes that meet great interest among clients. The Competence Center was especially successful in 2008 in the area of seismic, with a long-term cooperation agreed upon with the Norwegian group StatoilHydro.

Grid computing - cloud computing
In the year 2008, grid computing turned to cloud computing. New services such as the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud also offered new possibilities for us to apply our technology. Our individual grid solution PHASTGrid was ported to the Amazon Cloud and presented as a productive platform during trade fairs and talks already very early. We are dealing with the license management of cloud and grids on the basis of an innovative idea, currently developing a respective product.

The CC HPC is an active participant in D-Grid and the European EGEE project. One focus of activities is the further development of basic grid technologies and the participation in the grid standardization boards. Within a second main subject, Fraunhofer grid solutions have been further developed in cooperation with the Fraunhofer partners within the internal enterprise grid project. We have been able to apply PHASTGrid within different cooperation projects with industrial partners. A productive environment for the assessment of the quality and performance of the grid infrastructure has been made available to the D-Grid community by the development of the grid benchmark portal jawari.itwm.fraunhofer.de.

Visualization
In the field of CPU-based ray tracing methods, commercial products are meanwhile available. With PreStack-Pro, we were able to present an innovative software product for the quantitative analysis and visualization of large prestacks in oil industry at international trade fairs (SEG, EAGE). An entirely CPU-based postprocessor for the analysis of computation results of the software MAGMASOFT was developed for the company MAGMA Gießereitechnologie, and delivered to customers.

HPC tools
High-performance tools for the development of HPC software and systems are GraPA, a parallelization framework for hybrid applications in the area of multicore distributed memory, FVM, a software interface providing global shared memory on Infiniband clusters for parallel applications, and the parallel Fraunhofer file system FhGFS.

The activities with respect to the development of new tools for future multicore processors have been combined within the Multicore Innovation Center, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, IBM, and further industrial partners.