NCSA recently hosted a three-day workshop, supported by the National Science Foundation, that brought together over 100 researchers and students in the geosciences, chemistry and astronomy from as far away as Australia and Israel. The workshop was designed to help researchers with some experience in using accelerators such as the Cell processor and graphics processing units (GPUs) advance to the next level of productivity in achieving their scientific goals.

"We wanted to get together communities of people already working on accelerators and high-performance computing in their own domain, let them share what they've learned, build communities, and network," says NCSA researcher Vlad Kindratenko.

Participants were separated into their respective fields of research toward the end of workshop, chaired the breakout session for astronomy and astrophysics, where researchers heard from colleagues and exchanged ideas.

The astronomy community has a broad range of interests in the technology," says Robert Brunner, a University of Illinois astronomy professor who helped organize the workshop along with Stanford University chemist Todd Martinez and Illinois atmospheric scientist Bob Wilhelmson. "We're not just interested in creating simulations. We're more interested in accelerating data processing, analyzing large volumes of data in real time and transferring large amounts of data from observational sites, which are usually in locations with no civilization."

Alexey Titov, a graduate student in the chemistry department of the University of Illinois at Chicago, attended the workshop to learn about new codes and how they can be implemented on new architectures.

"It's important to know what the new technologies are and how they can could speed up calculations," he said. "During the workshop I found a few interesting codes that could accelerate my calculations. It also became clear that some simple codes could be developed in-house."

In addition to hands-on work with GPUs and Cell processors, researchers presented case studies on how they have applied these accelerators to their scientific computation.

Jacek Jakowski, researcher at Emory University, gave a poster presentation about a new method of quantum chemistry that he would like to accelerate using GPU techniques. He also presented some preliminary results on GPU.

"For me, the poster session was an opportunity to showcase my method, and get feedback on the technical side of GPU," says Jakowski. "Some of the lectures were very interesting," he says, "Especially those where I learned how other people are solving problems similar to mine."

Most presentations and posters are available on the workshop website:http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Conferences/accelerators/agenda.html.