
Stanford engineers team up with U.S. Army to set computational record - Oatseller
http://aa.stanford.edu/news-events/news/stanford-engineers-team-us-army-set-computational-record
======
math_and_stuff
This is complete fluff without quantifying the properties of the algebraic
system. 1D PDEs with billions of variables can easily be solved in seconds on
a laptop. Fully 3D highly indefinite equations are another story. The
university press should be ashamed.

~~~
Oatseller
I almost didn't submit it because there were no details on what "mathematical
equations" were used.

I think the emphasis was (or should have been) on the algorithms developed to
work with multiple processors, but there wasn't much info on that either.

    
    
        "When you connect 100 computers and tell them to solve a system of
        equations, I need to break it into 100 pieces and ship each piece to a
        computer, and then they need to talk to each other," Farhat said.
        "They cannot do this independently."
    
        To confront this well-known problem, Farhat and his team – led by Jari
        Toivanen, Radek Tezaur and Philip Avery – collaborated with the ARL
        DSRC to craft algorithms to divide these calculations among thousands
        of computers.
    
        The team members worked around the clock for three weeks to prepare
        their software for the test on Excalibur. When the day came last
        month, they had access to a significant chunk of the facility's
        101,184 processors to divide slices of their equations, share
        information and solve the problem. A mere three minutes later, those
        thousands of processors had solved over 10 billion calculations
        accurately.
    
    

It's also troubling when the link to "Army High Performance Computing Research
Center (AHPCRC)" gives a Drupal error.

~~~
math_and_stuff
If you're interested, Prof. Farhat is very well known for the FETI method [1],
which is likely what is being alluded to by the article. But the article as
written is devoid of any description of what was interesting about the
calculation.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FETI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FETI)

~~~
Oatseller

        Prof. Farhat is very well known for the FETI method
    

And he's flown with the Blue Angels (I would give anything to do that).

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/stanfordeng/sets/7215764813436...](https://www.flickr.com/photos/stanfordeng/sets/72157648134366930/)

------
zatkin
What exactly did they solve on those machines?

------
noobpost
This is old school monolithic system HPC trying to survive in a world of
distributed HPC and GPUs.

~~~
arcanus
Distributed hpc? GPUs? Wake me when distributed HPC or a GPU machine wins
gordon bell.

