Interactive High Performance Computing for Music

Abstract

The origins of computer music are closely tied to the development of the first high-performance computers associated with major academic and research institutions. These institutions have continued to build extremely powerful computers, now containing thousands of CPUs with incredible processing power. Their precursors were typically designed to operate in non-real time, “batch” mode, and that tradition has remained a dominant paradigm for high performance computing. We describe experimental research in developing the interactive use of a modern high- performance machine, the Abe supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus, for real-time musical and artistic purposes. We describe the requirements, development, problems, and observations from this project.