A System Software Architecture for High End Computing

MPP systems can neither solve Grand Challenge scientific problems nor enable large-scale industrial and governmental simulations if they rely on extensions to workstation system software. We present a new system architecture used at Sandia. Highest performance is achieved through a lightweight applications interface to a collection of processing nodes. Usability is provided by creating node partitions specialized for user access, networking, and I/O. The system is glued together by a data movement interface called portals. Portals allow data to flow between processing nodes with minimal system overhead while maintaining a suitable degree of protection and reconfigurability.