DASH: Dynamic, flexible computational acceleration using specialized hardware

Specialized computing hardware, such as GPUs and FPGAs, can provide dramatically better performance than existing, CPU-based systems. This specialized hardware is readily available in the commercial market and widely used in high-performance computing systems, making it easy to achieve high performance per watt and per dollar. The major unsolved challenge in using specialized hardware efficiently in an HPC environment is effectively distributing computational work among multiple computing devices contained within a single hardware platform. To address this issue, ATC-NY will develop DASH, a software platform for efficiently distributing computing tasks in an HPC environment among multiple specialized hardware devices. DASH will enable HPC software to effectively utilize all available computational resources on a system, even heterogeneous collections of specialized hardware. DASH provides an interface to hardware systems built from COTS components, enabling a single software application to obtain hardware-accelerated performance on many different nodes of a distributed computing system, even when individual nodes in the system have different hardware configurations. This enables an end user to choose hardware configurations for individual nodes based on the operating environment and processing demands for that particular node. Approved for Public Release 14-MDA-8047 (14 Nov 14)