Virginia Tech Earns International Honor for Supercomputer
Apple nominated Virginia Tech for its development of a 2,200-processor
supercomputer with a cluster of 1,100 Power Mac G5 computers. Called System
X, the supercomputer is the world's third fastest with the best price and
performance for a top supercomputing facility.
Virginia Tech faced stiff competition with more than 250 of this year's most
innovative applications of technology submitted for consideration. In April,
Virginia Tech was named one of five finalists for the award along with Rice
University, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, CoreTek, and the Columbus Zoo.
Entries came from 33 states and 26 countries.
Virginia Tech is using information technology to make great strides toward
remarkable social achievement in science," said Daniel Morrow, executive
director of the Computerworld Honors Program. "The materials submitted on
behalf of Virginia Tech will enrich the program's growing collection on the
Information Age and help build an accurate record of the truly outstanding
achievements being made in these remarkable times."
Virginia Tech built
"a world-class supercomputer to tackle fundamental,
grand challenge problems in computational science and engineering. While
supercomputers have been invaluable, their high cost of often tens to
hundreds of millions of dollars has limited their deployment to a few
national facilities. The goal of the Virginia Tech project was to develop
novel computing architectures that reduce their cost, time to build, and
maintenance complexity. As a result, institutions with relatively modest
budgets can now afford to build a premier supercomputer," said Hassan Aref,
dean of Virginia Tech1s College of Engineering.
The engineering college collaborated with the University1s Information
Technology group to build the supercomputer. As the cluster was being built,
the University named Srinidhi Varadarajan, an assistant professor of
computer science in the College of Engineering, the director of Tech1s new
Terascale Computing Facility. Jason Lockhart, also of the College of
Engineering, and Kevin Shinpaugh of information technology were named
associate directors. Pat Arvin, associate vice president for information
technology, and Glenda Scales, associate dean for research computing and
distance learning in the College of Engineering, provided the overall
direction for the project that included some 160 student volunteers.
Varadarajan started the Virginia Tech initiative with a National Science
Foundation grant to expand and upgrade a small supercomputer he was
directing on campus. Conversations with Lockhart and others led to the
grander goal.
In the 1970s, a paradigm shift occurred when large expensive mainframes
made way to increasingly powerful minicomputers, which were affordable to
academic and industrial research labs. The resulting spurt in research -
both into computing and the use of computing - led to the computing
landscape today.
"We believe System X is the first step in a similar paradigm shift in
supercomputer architectures from expensive custom supercomputers to
inexpensive cluster based supercomputers to solve the largest research
problems an area called capability computing. At a price of $5.2 million,
world-class supercomputing is now within the reach of academic research
budgets, enabling the larger community of academic researchers to tackle
fundamental problems with easily available supercomputing resources,"
Varadarajan said.
Varadarajan is also the developer of "Déjà vu," a software package that
brings stability to large clusters. "We developed the first comprehensive
solution called Déjà vu - to the problem of transparent parallel
checkpointing and recovery, which enables large-scale supercomputers to mask
hardware, operating system, and software failures a decades old problem,"
he said.
System X is going through an upgrade process, wherein the nodes that
comprise the supercomputer are being replaced by the Xserve G5 server
platform. This upgrade has several advantages. It reduces the size of the
supercomputer by a factor of three, consuming significantly less power than
its predecessor. It generates less heat thereby reducing the cooling
requirements. The upgrade adds automatic error correcting memory that can
recover from transient bit errors. Finally, it has significant hardware
monitoring capabilities line voltages, fan speeds, communications - that
allow real-time analysis of the health of the system.
Virginia Tech's partners for building System X were Apple, Mellanox, Cisco,
and Liebert. Mellanox is the leading provider of the InfiniBand
semiconductor technology, the primary communications fabric, drivers, cards,
and switches for the project. Cisco1s Gigabit Ethernet switches were the
choice for the secondary communications fabric to interconnect the cluster.
Cisco provided a significant educational discount to support the project.
Liebert, a division of Emerson Network Power, known for its comprehensive
range of protection systems for sensitive electronics, provided the cooling
system.
The College of Engineering at Virginia Tech is internationally recognized
for its excellence in 14 engineering disciplines and computer science. The
college1s 5,600 undergraduates benefit from an innovative curriculum that
provides a "hands-on, minds-on" approach to engineering education,
complementing classroom instruction with two unique design-and-build
facilities and a strong Cooperative Education Program. With more than 50
research centers and numerous laboratories, the college offers its 2,000
graduate students opportunities in advanced fields of study such as
biomedical engineering, state-of-the-art micr'electronics, and
nanotechnology.
Founded in 1872 as a land-grant college, Virginia Tech has grown to become
the largest university in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Today, Virginia
Tech1s eight colleges are dedicated to putting knowledge to work through
teaching, research, and outreach activities and to fulfilling its vision to
be among the top 30 research universities in the nation. At its 2,600-acre
main campus located in Blacksburg and other campus centers in Northern
Virginia, Southwest Virginia, Hampton Roads, Richmond, and Roanoke, Virginia
Tech enrolls more than 28,000 full- and part-time undergraduate and graduate
students from all 50 states and more than 100 countries in 180 academic
degree programs.