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Computing Clusters: Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own
11/18/2005
The idea of cluster computing is elegant. Rack up a bunch of CPUs from off the shelf and get them processing in lock step to knock out hard research problems. Of course, the details are more complex than that, as two high-performance computing centers share in this article. But the fact is that some of the same components that make up the machine taking up space on your desktop can now be applied to solving scientific and engineering problems that used to be the purview of 'big iron' mainframes in a former era.
So what is the difference between computing clusters and the PC sitting in front of you? According to Russ Miller, founding director of the Center for Computational Research (CCR; www.ccr.buffalo.edu) and distinguished professor of computer science and engineering at SUNY-Buffalo, 'If you wanted to predict tomorrow's weather for the southern states in the US-maybe half a dozen states-on your laptop, it would probably take three months.' Thus the need for more intensive computing power.
NCSA's Vast Computing Power
What d'es a high-performance computing cluster look like? The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA; www.ncsa.uiuc.edu) currently runs two high-end clusters. One, nicknamed Tungsten, is a Xeon 3.0 Ghz Dell (www.dell.com) cluster with 2,480 processors and 3GB of memory per node. This system, the center Web site claims, is the 10th fastest supercomputer in the world. The other, named Mercury, was built by IBM and consists of 1,176 processors with between 4 gigabytes and 12 gigabytes of memory per node. These clusters are physically huge. According to John Towns, senior associate director, Persistent Infrastructure Directorate at NCSA, the Dell setup has five rows with nine racks in each row. It required multiple trucks to make several deliveries to get all of its components to the center.The two clusters, along with an SGI Altix 3000 and an IBM p690, make up the four major systems that allow NCSA to serve academic researchers in the US with computing projects that require massive parallelism. (All have nicknames coming from the metal family.) Also part of the environment is a mass storage system named UniTree, which serves all the computers and has the capacity to archive three petabytes of data. (There's room to grow; it currently holds less than two petabytes.)
Towns estimates that 'in excess of 400 activities' are going on within his directorate currently. But of larger-scale activities-those funded at half a million dollars or more a year-there are about six projects happening at any point in time.
One such endeavor in which NCSA is involved is called LEAD (Linked Environment for Atmospheric Discovery; www.lead.ou.edu). The objective, he explains, is to discover a next-generation environment for research and prediction of weather-'so that we understand not only whether it's going to rain next week, but if we see conditions developing that would indicate, say, a tornado, [we can] help emergency management services to evacuate the counties that are going to be affected.'
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