Welcome to the CAP Research Program home page.

The CAP Research Program is a collaborative research program between Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd and The Australian National University.

List of contents

Overview of CAP Research Program

The CAP Research Program constitutes Area 2 of the collaborative research agreements between Fujitsu and ANU. Area 3 involves porting of scientific codes (eg. for quantum chemistry, climate modelling etc) to Fujitsu machines such as the VP2000 series, the AP1000, the AP3000 and the VPP500 series. Area 4 involves the development of high-performance parallel numerical algebra and other mathematical algorithms and libraries. The name CAP comes from an early prototype machine made by Fujitsu also known as the CAP, or the Cellular Array Processor.

The Area 2 Project has undergone 3 phases. Phase I (1990-1997) was primarily concerned with systems and application software development for the Fujitsu AP1000 and AP+ distributed memory multicomputers. The target architecture shifted to the Fujitsu AP3000 distributed memory multicomputer for Phase II (1997-1999). Phase III, commenced October 1999, represents a major change in emphasis, looking at memory behavior of shared memory multiprocessors, with issues related to clusters of these machines being also relevant. Phase III was scheduled for three years and formally ended in October 2002; however, several of the related projects are still continuing.

Research project descriptions

Throughout the life of the CAP Research Program, a number of projects have come and gone, as have a number of different ways that we view their interrelationship. Currently we see the projects being clustered as follows:
CAP Phase III Projects
* The Sparc-Sulima Machine Simulator Project
* Memory Performance of KDD Applications
* A Distributed Java Virtual Machine for a Beowulf Cluster
* Cluster Systems Research

CAP Phase II Projects
* Parallel Linear Algebra
* Multi-computer Object Stores
* Parallel Gang Scheduling System
* Support Technologies for Parallel Programming
* Checkpoint/restart for Solaris and Linux

* Old (Mainly Phase I) CAP Projects
* AP/Linux
* Visualisation (PARVIS)
* Message Passing Interface (MPI)
* Parallel Filesystem (HiDIOS)
* Text Manipulation (PADRE)   Still active, but moved to ACSys TAR project.
*Parallel ML (paraML)
*LINDA
*FDDI interface for the AP1000

Annual reports and other publications

Annual reports of the CAP Research Program are available in a minimally marked-up format, for the years 1991/92, 1992/93, 1993/94, 1994/95, 1995/96, 1996/97, 1997/98, 1998/99, 1999/00, 2000/01 and 2001/02.

A fairly comprehensive list of publications arising out of the CAP Research Program is accessible from here.

Researchers

The CAP project team at ANU consists of full-time research staff, teaching staff, some half-teaching, half-research staff, postgraduate students, and programming support staff. These people are spread across the Department of Computer Science and the Computer Sciences Laboratory.

The Director of the CAP Research Program is:

The Leader of the CAP Research Program is:

Other researchers in the Phase III team are: Our best contact information for people who have worked in the CAP Team in the past.

AP1000 architecture and programming information

The 128 node AP1000 was decommssioned in October 2000.

A brief overview of the Fujitsu AP1000 architecture, plus programmming documentation.

CAP Program System Information

Other high-performance computing sites

The following contains just a short set of interesting URLs for other high-performance and/or parallel computing sites on the Web. It doesn't attempt to be complete.

Local sites at ANU

Sites from around the world

Fri Jun 18 10:40:22 EST 2004