Enabling High-Productivity SIP Application Development: Modeling and Simulation of Superconducting Quantum Interference Filters

Abstract

The inherent complexity in utilizing and programming high performance computing (HPC) systems is the main obstacle to widespread exploitation of HPC resources and technologies in the Department of Defense (DoD). Consequently, there is the persistent need to simplify the programming interface for the generic user. This need is particularly acute in the Signal/Image Processing (SIP), Integrated Modeling and Test Environments (IMT), and related DoD communities where typical users have heterogeneous unconsolidated needs. Mastering the complexity of traditional programming tools (C, MPI, etc.) is often seen as a diversion of energy that could be applied to the study of the given scientific domain. Many SIP users instead prefer high-level languages (HLLs) within integrated development environments, such as MATLAB. We report on our collaborative effort to use a HLL distribution for HPC systems called ParaM to optimize and parallelize a compute-intensive Superconducting Quantum Interference Filter (SQIF) application provided by the Navy SPAWAR Systems Center in San Diego, CA. ParaM is an open-source HLL distribution developed at the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC), and includes support for processor architectures not supported by MATLAB (e.g., Itanium and POWER5) as well as support for high-speed interconnects (e.g., InfiniBand and Myrinet). We make use of ParaM installations available at the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) DoD Supercomputing Resource Center (DSRC) and OSC to perform a successful optimization/parallelization of the SQIF application. This optimization/parallelization may be used to assess the feasibility of using SQIF devices as extremely sensitive detectors for electromagnetic radiation which is of great importance to the Navy and DoD in general.