Advanced Computing Testbeds

Advanced computing has transformed the way we live, touching nearly every aspect of our lives. It has helped us understand and protect our environment, develop new sources of renewable energy, and secure our nation. It is so fundamental to our relationship with the natural world that scientists consider it to be the third pillar of research, alongside theory and experimentation.

Advanced computing testbeds, the proving grounds for new machines, are central to the development of next-generation computers. They allow researchers to explore a complex and non-linear design space and facilitate the evaluation of new computing technologies in terms of performance and efficiency on critical scientific workloads. These “laboratories of machines,” in which multiple components are available for experimentation, are critical to the next greatest advancements in computation.

Advanced computers, which cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take years to plan and build, can be constructed and programmed in countless ways. The most effective among them require fundamentally new answers to questions like application algorithms, programming models, system architecture, component/device technology, resilience, power, and cost.

This “building the machine” requires both theory and experimentation, making advanced computing testbeds ever more essential. They allow scientists, engineers, and designers an opportunity to evaluate their theories to see whether their vision of its programming and architecture will deliver reasonable performance and efficiency. This type of experimentation is akin to the push and pull between theoretical and experimental physics: a scientist imagines what type of system might work, but there is distance between theory and reality. 

The research and development of even the oldest “modern” computers—those built during World War II for complex mathematical calculations related to ballistics for artillery—required testbeds.

This continued through the next iteration of computers in the 1950s and ‘60s as these machines moved from mechanical to electronic devices. It was around this time that computers expanded their reach into the business world, where they were used to forecast business models. Early devices were programmed machines that relied on stacks of punch cards. Later innovations in software—specifically, the creation of programming language—spurred rapid change, drastically expanding computers’ capabilities.

The modern era brought about Seymour Cray and his vector machines, which made their debut in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. These highly specialized computers were particularly valuable in scientific discovery because they could efficiently “vectorize” loops of instructions- rather than applying a set of instructions to each data point individually, sets of instructions could be applied to sets of values. This allowed for rapid processing over vectors of data and proved useful in the area of fluid dynamics and later, climate modeling.

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