Through participation in the Concurrent Supercomputing Consortium (CSCC), CRPC researchers have access to the Intel Touchstone Delta located at the California Institute of Technology. In its first two years of operation, the Delta system at Caltech was the premiere facility for parallel computing research in the world. The unique collaboration between Intel and the CSCC to bring this system to Caltech serves as an excellent example of industrial-academic cooperation. Caltech owns and operates the Delta on behalf of the CSCC.
Several grand challenge applications have been run on the Delta, including applications in climate modeling, aerospace design, and air pollution modeling. The Touchstone Delta is a distributed-memory Multiple Instruction, Multiple Data (MIMD) system with more than 513 computational nodes (i.e., they are intended for execution of user application programs), each of which consists of an i860 processor with 16 megabytes of memory.
Paul Messina's interests include concurrent computing, distributed computing over wide-area networks, and performance measurement of parallel programs. Recent efforts he has been involved in at Caltech include high-performance computing, characterization of data movement patterns in parallel applications, and parallel computing environments. Among his recent accomplishments are conceiving, forming, and directing a national consortium for concurrent computing, managing the CASA gigabit network project, and managing and coordinating large-scale concurrent computing facilities at Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
