STTR Phase I: Ultra-large and low-cost electrodynamic modeling in commercial clouds

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project is to enable anyone with internet to access extremely powerful computing facilities to perform scientific computing. High performance computing is essential for computational prototyping in many areas of modern engineering, such as solar cells, automobiles, aerospace, and communication devices. However, significant barriers make it difficult for ordinary engineers to easily access powerful computing facilities. By leveraging the low-cost commercial cloud, the project will develop key technology that allow commercial clouds to perform extremely high performance scientific computing, thereby significantly reducing the cost and increasing the accessibility of high performance computing. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop technologies that overcome key challenges in using commercial clouds for high performance computing. Unlike high performance computers, commercial clouds are not designed for scientific computing. They have high latency, intermitted availability, and heterogeneously distributed resources. These features make it difficult to conduct scientific computing. This project will develop new computing methods that fully take into account the heterogeneous nature of the commercial cloud. It enables anyone to access high performance scientific computing anywhere with an easy-to-use interface. Computing is provided as on-demand service. Engineers would not need to own any high performance computers and the computing resources are virtually unlimited.