Development of High Performance Computing (HPC) Technology for a Distributed Modeling and Simulation (M&S) Hardware Infrastructure

The Missile Defense Agency (MDA) has identified the need for higher-performance computing capabilities for improved modeling and simulation (M&S) within its Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS) Ground Test platform. Modeling and simulation plays a significant role in the Missile Defense Agencys ability to maintain and ensure their mission readiness and to expand mission capability. While powerful, specialized, and inexpensive COTS computing hardware is readily available to address this need, what is lacking is a capability for efficiently harnessing that the power of that hardware for running computationally-intensive software applications. DASH is a software platform that closes this capability gap by efficiently distributing computational tasks in a software program among the hardware computing resources available on that system. DASH combines existing mature and cutting-edge technologies to provide a unified and effective platform for acceleration of computational tasks. DASH provides an interface to hardware systems built from COTS components, enabling software application to obtain hardware-accelerated performance regardless of hardware configuration or computational workload. DASH will enable MDA to obtain orders-of-magnitude improvements in the performance and capabilities of M&S software by integrating inexpensive commercial hardware acceleration components into their distributed computing system.