DREAM: A Special-Purpose Computer for Large Scale Mesh Calculations

Details DREAM: A Special-Purpose Computer for Large Scale Mesh Calculations DREAM: A Special-Purpose Computer for Large Scale Mesh Calculations

Aug 1991

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1991pasj...43..639m&link_type=abstract

Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan, v.43, p.639-648.

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

1

Finite Difference Methods, Numerical Simulation, Special-Purpose Computers

Scientific paper

We present the concept of DREAM (Disk REsource Array Machine), a computer designed for large-scale simulations using finite-difference grids. At present, such simulations are usually performed on vector processors, on which the size of the calculation is limited not by the speed of computation but by the size of the memory. The DREAM system uses an array of magnetic disks as the main memory, instead of silicon solid-state memory chips. Since the price per bit of a magnetic disk is about 1/100 that of a silicon memory, we can construct a machine with a 100-times larger memory for the same cost. The access time of a disk is about 10(5) times longer than that of a silicon memory. In the case of finite-difference calculations using regular grids, however, this access time becomes negligible, since the memory is accessed only in long vectors. Using currently available technology, a DREAM system with 2 Gbytes of disk space and effective speed of 40 Mflops costs around 3 million Japanese yen. A system with a 200 Gbytes disk and a 10 Gflops speed would cost a few hundred million yen. We also discuss the reliability of the hardware and the possibility of applying DREAM to other fields, such as the reduction of large amount of observational data.

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