ISAAC is a three-year (2010-2013) NSF funded project to focus on research and development of infrastructure to accelerate Physics and Astronomy applications using multicore architectures.
The goal of the project is to successfully harness the power of the parallel architectures for compute-intensive scientific problems and open doors for new discovery and revolutionize the growth of science.
The motivation for ISAAC is the rapid growth of data rates and volumes (peta-operations/second, 15 petabytes/year) in physics and astronomy simulations, observations, experiments and analyses that is leading to a critical computational impasse. ISAAC team researches and develops fundamentally new energy efficient supercomputing architectures and solutions aimed towards petascale to exascale computing challenges.
ISAAC approach is unique in that it is science/application-driven where the key application-drivers are identified up-front to assess the efficacy of this new approach. The set of applications are categorized into three separate domains - simulation, instrumentation and data processing - covering specific real-case challenges in cosmology, radio astronomy, optics, and image/data processing with potential of interdisciplinary relevance. The developed infrastructure is available to the broader scientific community with methodologies for easy implementation.
ISAAC deliverables are infrastructure of comprehensive software libraries, tools, frameworks, easy-assembly common hardware modules and complete turnkey solutions by leveraging emerging many-core architectures with emphasis on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs).
ISAAC leverages ICCS partners including international groups in National Astronomical Observatories of China, and University of Heidelberg, Germany.
ISAAC is committed to education and public outreach by engaging and enabling students and broader research community.
