Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Pell, O.
• Bower, J.
• Dimond, R.
• Mencer, O.
• Flynn, M. J.

Titel

Finite-Difference Wave Propagation Modeling on Special-Purpose Dataflow Machines

Ist Teil von

• IEEE transactions on parallel and distributed systems, 2013-05, Vol.24 (5), p.906-915

Ort / Verlag

New York: IEEE

Erscheinungsjahr

2013

Quelle

IEEE Electronic Library (IEL)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Modeling wave propagation through the earth is an important application in geoscience. We present a framework for wave propagation modeling on special-purpose hardware, which dramatically improves the application performance compared to conventional CPUs. We utilize custom hardware platforms consisting of a mix of x86 CPUs and dataflow engines connected by high-bandwidth communication links. Application programmers describe their algorithms in a domain specific language using Java syntax, with special dataflow semantics overlayed on top of the Java language. The application-specific dataflow engines run at hundreds of MHz with massive parallelism and deliver high performance/Watt, up to 30 times more energy efficient than conventional CPUs. The power efficiency of this approach suggests that dataflow computing may have a key role to play in the improvements in power efficiency necessary to reach exascale computing.