Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
Mystery Content
Computing Clusters: Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own
11/18/2005
One of five original centers opened as part of the National Science Foundation's Supercomputer Centers Program in 1986, NCSA is on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before the founding of these US-based resources, the only supercomputing resources existed within the Department of Defense (www.defenselink.mil) and the Department of Energy (www.defense.gov). Nothing was available to academic researchers seeking access to 'unclassified' equipment. Many researchers resorted to doing their work abroad--primarily Germany, according to Towns--to get access to these types of systems.
The explosive growth of the cluster approach is an almost-inevitable result of more powerful commodity-priced computers, the blossoming of the open source community (which provides operating systems, management tools, and many of the applications), and a breaking away from centralized control of computing power.
The latter, especially, can't be underestimated. Although the computing resources are maintained and managed in a single location, access to them is an almost-democratic undertaking at some cluster computing sites, such as CCR. All details of the systems are publicly displayed and updated constantly on the center's Web site-including the performance of individual systems, which jobs are running on particular nodes, the status of the queue for computing activities, and even the comings and goings of staff, researchers, students, visitors, etc. at various parts of center as broadcast on Webcams.
A Quick History of Cluster Computing
In its essence cluster computing hasn't really changed much since its introduction in 1993 with the launch of projects like Beowulf. Donald Becker and Thomas Sterling met at MIT with a common interest: to figure out how to use commodity-based (read: low-cost) hardware as an alternative to large supercomputers. According to Phil Merkey, an assistant professor in Mathematics and Computer Science at Michigan Technological University, the prototype system consisted of 16 DX4 processors connected by Ethernet. The machine was 'an instant success' and the idea of commodity off the shelf-based systems 'quickly spread through NASA and into academic and research communities.'
At the National Center for Supercomputing Applications John Towns recalls working with the computer science department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign then with vendors-most notably IBM-to design and build a cluster consisting of 1,024 nodes using Pentium 3 chips. NCSA's goal was to find a 'high performance solution.' The result was nicknamed Platinum by the center. IBM then turned around and productized the cluster, which became the IBM Cluster1300.
The Racks of CCR
Says CCR's Miller, 'Our knee-jerk reaction to any quest is to say, 'Yes.'' The mission of the resources at CCR is to support high-end computing, visualization, data storage and networking to 'enable discovery in the 21st century.' Miller says his group supports work in computational science and engineering for the campus, as well as a 'whole host of endeavors, whether they're at the university, corporate partners, local companies, local government agencies or what have you.' That includes a recent animation project for MTV2 (Recommended Reading
- REINVENTING HISTORY
Sometimes the best way to respond to technology challenges is to innovate.
- Creating Tomorrow’s Classrooms
- Creating Tomorrow’s Classrooms
- Industry Resources
- Collaboration Brings Students, Schools Closer Together
- Collaboration Brings Students, Schools Closer Together
