CI-P: Collaborative Project: Planning for Community Infrastructure to Support Research for Simulating Complex Systems

University Of Akron, Akron OH

Investigators

Abstract

Digital supercomputers have become exponentially faster in recent years, but these general-purpose machines still leave much to be desired in terms of computational speed for mathematically rigorous simulations of various physics-based systems. Moreover, digital computer performance is beginning to saturate due to fundamental limitations in transistor scaling and switching speed. However, the analog performance of transistors continues to improve, and frequency ranges exceeding 400 GHz are now available for applications such as millimeter wave wireless communications, imaging, and radar. Hence there is a lot of interest in high-speed analog co-processors that can rapidly perform certain specialized simulations by taking advantage of modern nanoscale integrated circuit technology. The overall goal of the project is to discover the theory, design the circuits, and verify the operation of scalable analog computation units with multi-GHz bandwidths that can be seamlessly integrated into modern digital computation architectures, thus enabling novel hybrid (analog/digital) computing paradigms. This "planning" research is designed to obtain the foundational knowledge, derive the requirements and specifications, and determine the teaming needs for an eventual full project to the CRI program that will enable the CISE community to more easily explore this "beyond Moore" computing paradigm. In particular, it will provide shared resources for developing and using radio frequency (RF) analog accelerators for various scientific computing applications. This CI-P planning activities will explore several mathematical models that can be efficiently mapped to massively-parallel integrated analog accelerators. The mathematical models may include simplified versions of difficult scientific computing problems (e.g., the shallow-water version of the Navier-Stokes equations) and important problems in engineering (e.g., Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism). The planning stage will include a one-day "Ideas Workshop" to facilitate informal discussions between CISE researchers belonging to several universities who are either experienced in analog and hybrid computing, or have significant interest in the topic. The project includes significant educational and outreach activities, including outreach activities at local high schools in the Cleveland-Akron area, summer workshops at the lead-PI's laboratory at the University of Akron, and mentorship/research experiences at Case Western Reserve University.