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
www.mtv2.com) (which had contracted with a Buffalo company that, in turn, contracted with the center), hosting workshops for local high school students to learn about computational chemistry and bioinformatics, as well as other work that will benefit the local community.Then there's the research, currently about 140 different projects, ranging from vaccine development, to magnetic properties modeling, to predicting better ways to make earthquake-resistant material.
One project Miller describes that is being run on the clusters is trying to understand water flow. 'We have a group in civil engineering who are modeling the Great Lakes and the Great Lakes region,' says Miller. 'What they've done is develop algorithms that can take advantage of massive parallelism... [to] get a better and finer understanding of the Great Lakes and how the water moves and how it flows than was ever possible before, by orders of magnitude. For example, you can imagine somebody putting a contaminant in the Great Lakes and you say to yourself, 'OK, depending on how people are watering their lawns, taking showers, washing their cars in Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and so on, when and how bad will the contaminants be when they hit New York City?''
CCR has multiple Dell clusters, but the two largest ones are Joplin, with 264 nodes running Red Hat Linux (www.redhat.com), and U2, the newest system, with 1,024 nodes (with main memory varying from 2 to 8 gigabytes on each of the nodes on U2). U2 is also running RedHat Linux though a different version. Miller has the honor of naming the machines and the current naming scheme honors inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The front ends to the system are named Bono (vocalist for U2) and The Edge (guitarist); two administrative servers that help keep track of and monitor the system are called Larry (drums) and Adam (bass) because, he says, they 'keep everything running.'
Currently, only about two-thirds of U2 is powered up at any one time, since the system is still going through testing. Once the Center gets the older system, Joplin, updated with the same version of RedHat that U2 is running, says Miller, it'll be integrated into U2's queuing system. 'The [capacity] computing jobs will be automatically routed to what was called Joplin-those nodes; the [capability] computing jobs will be automatically routed to U2; and it'll be transparent to the users. It'll be one queue that's essentially an Intel (www.intel.com) Pentium line of chips.' The only change for the users, explains Miller, is that they'll need to answer a couple of extra questions about their projects up front-such as 'whether the code they need to run is 32-bit or 64-bit compatible, which means it can run on both places-or if it's just 32-bit or just 64-bit. And we'll be able to route things to the appropriate nodes.'
Getting Access to the Power
To gain access, CCR has 'basic minimal requirements,' says Miller. The user describes the project and required resources in terms of storage and compute power.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
