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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Special Features:
SDSC TO SHOWCASE SUN COMPUTE GRID
SUPERCOMPUTER
A team of cluster computing experts from the San Diego Supercomputer Center
(SDSC) will assemble, install and demonstrate real applications on a Sun Fire
V60x Compute Grid supercomputer in a matter of two hours at the Supercomputing
2003 conference, the annual high performance networking and computing show in
Phoenix.
The SDSC/National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure
(NPACI) Rocks cluster team will begin assembling the RockStar -- a 128-node
Sun Fire V60x supercomputer at 7 p.m., Nov. 17, at the conference and intends
to be running applications approximately two hours later. Starting with empty
racks and a set of CDs, the completed machine is expected to rank among the
top supercomputers in the world. The demonstration, in Sun's booth (#623),
will illustrate how NPACI Rocks software and the Sun Grid Engine, Enterprise
Edition software enable users to more easily set up and manage powerful, yet
relatively inexpensive cluster computers.
Visitors to Sun's booth can talk with the Rocks and Sun Grid Engine team
members while watching the physical cluster construction progress, software
installation and application provisioning. RockStar's construction is expected
to be complete by midday Nov. 18.
"We're firmly in the era of personal supercomputing," said Philip
Papadopoulos, program director for SDSC's Grid and Cluster Computing group.
"We want to use this forum to show researchers just how simply and quickly
they can put together powerful cluster systems as originally envisioned by the
Berkeley NOW and Beowulf projects in the mid '90s. Where the original systems
required dedicated cluster experts to execute that vision, NPACI Rocks
software makes this personal aspect real by allowing scientists to spend most
of their time using their supercomputer to make discoveries and almost none of
their time as a system administrator."
With more than 140 registered systems created using the NPACI Rocks
toolkit,
the processing potential of computers administered by the software suite now
exceeds 26 teraflops -- computing power that researchers all over the world
are using to advance science in fields ranging from biomedicine to geophysics.
The Sun-based RockStar cluster was initially tested at SDSC and its benchmark
number of 699GFlops was used for submission to the November Top 500 List.
The Plant Behind The Power
NPACI Rocks software is a turnkey open-source clustering system that is
based
on the latest Red Hat Linux platform and allows users to download CD disk
images, burn them on their local PC, follow a simple setup procedure and then
install a complete working cluster very quickly. It includes an expanding
collection of community-standard cluster-aware components including Sun Grid
Engine, MPI, Ganglia Monitoring, ATLAS BLAS, High-Performance Linpack (HPL),
IOZone and Streams benchmarks. Standard Grid software packages such as Globus
and Condor are also included and are based on the National Science
Foundation's National Middleware Initiative packaging and integration. NPACI
Rocks uses a description mechanism to define system configurations without
resorting to disk images or requiring a resident cluster expert. NPACI Rocks
is compatible with all hardware that Red Hat supports on both IA-32 and IA-64
platforms and will soon include support for Opteron processors.
The Sun Fire V60x server is a next-generation, x86-based, entry-level
system
capable of running standard Linux platform distributions, Red Hat Enterprise
Linux, SuSE Enterprise Linux Server or the Solaris Operating System, x86
Platform Edition. A key component in the Sun Fire Compute Grid Rack Cluster
solution, the Sun Fire V60x combined with Sun Control Station and Sun Grid
Engine software helps simplify compute Grid management, reduce system
administration cost, increase compute resource utilization and improve
productivity of a compute Grid.
"With SDSC and NPACI, Sun is tapping into some of the most innovative
developments in Grid computing," said Shahin Khan, vice president of Sun's
high performance and technical computing business unit. "The RockStar compute
Grid supercomputer is a great example of partnerships that help Sun build the
expertise and perspective necessary to take supercomputing technologies into
business computing."
"Through endeavors like the RockStar project, SDSC is developing a
hardware,
software and application base that will advance computer technology and
promote scientific research," said Fran Berman, SDSC's director. "Our cluster
computing program is integrated with SDSC work in high performance computing,
networking, data technology and visualization to help form the new
cyberinfrastructure for science and engineering research."
Papadopoulos is the principal investigator on a research project that
includes
joint activities with the California Institute for Telecommunications and
Information Technology [Cal-(IT)2] to enhance their collaboration on
scientific projects including the OptIPuter, the Biomedical Informatics
Research Network (BIRN) and the Geosciences Network (GEON).
"The Sun Fire V60x Compute Grid Supercomputer will have significant,
campus-wide impact as the anchor of a next-generation Grid at UCSD," said
Larry Smarr, Cal-(IT)2's director and PI on the OptIPuter project. "The
equipment builds on Sun's ongoing collaboration with Cal-(IT)2 as well as
years of partnering with SDSC on key projects, and underscores its commitment
to research that will define the future of cyberinfrastructure."
Industry Experts Endorse NPACI Rocks Software
Several world-class leading scientific researchers, including Smarr, will
present in the Sun Microsystems booth during the initial RockStar build Monday
night. Detailing their research goals, each will show how Rocks enables them
to do networked, high-performance computing.
Dr. Kim Baldridge, program director at the San Diego Supercomputer Center
and
one of the originators of the General Atomic and Molecular Electronic
Structure System (GAMESS) computational chemistry package will present a talk
on Computational Structure/Reactivity Investigations of Illudin-Based
Anti-tumor Agents. The study has provided significant insight into the
mechanism of action of new drug compounds, and offers design strategies to
improve selectivity of agents towards cancer cells. During SC03, approximately
25 percent of RockStar will be dedicated to a long-running GAMESS simulation
and attendees will be able to monitor its progress during the week.
Dr. Dogan Seber, PI for Portal Development and Education, and Project
Manager
of the GEON will describe the GEON project and how this groundbreaking
collaboration between Earth Science and Computer Science researchers is
building a modern cyberinfrastructure for the Earth Sciences. GEON will enable
geoscientists to integrate, analyze, model and visualize today's enormous and
complex multidisciplinary 4-D Earth Science data sets. By providing
leading-edge data integration and Grid computing services to support
geosciences research and collaboration on unprecedented scales, GEON will make
possible new insights into the complex dynamics of Earth systems. When
RockStar returns to UCSD, Geo-scientists will use it as a large resource on
the GEON Grid.
Smarr will describe the challenges that all-optical ultra-high bandwidth
networks bring to the distributed systems architecture. The
multi-disciplinary, six university OptIPuter team is addressing the structure
and impact of an emerging super network or "lambda-Grid" paradigm on
computing. The goal of this new architecture is to enable scientists who are
generating terabytes and petabytes of data to interactively visualize, analyze
and correlate their data from multiple storage sites interconnected by optical
networks. The RockStar cluster will provide an anchor point of the rapidly
developing optIPuter experimental platform being deployed across the UCSD
campus.
Dr. Maryann Martone, scientific coordinator for the Mouse BIRN testbed,
will
present an overview of the BIRN project, and how data Grids, high-performance
computers and high-speed networks are enabling a new kind of scientific
investigations in multi-scale models of disease. The mouse BIRN, one of three
scientific testbeds, consists of a team of researchers at four institutions
who are studying animal models of disease at different anatomical scales to
test hypotheses associated with human neurological disorders. Later in the
week, A demonstration and tour of 3D Slicer, which was recently ported to the
Rocks environment, will be run on RockStar by one of its key developers, Dr.
Steve Pieper who is the Human Morphometry BIRN Core PI for the Surgical
Planning Lab at Harvard/Brigham and Women's Hospital.
About SDSC
The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) is leading the way in developing
a
national Cyberinfrastructure that will provide the technological foundation
for the next generation of science and engineering advances.
Founded in 1985, SDSC is an organized research unit of the University of
California, San Diego. With a staff of more than 400 scientists, software
developers and support personnel, SDSC is an international leader in data
management, biosciences, geosciences, Grid computing and visualization.
Primarily funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), SDSC is the
leading-edge site for The National Partnership for Advanced Computational
Infrastructure (NPACI), a 41-institution partnership to create computational
environments for tomorrow's scientific discovery. For more information, visit
www.sdsc.edu/.
About Sun Microsystems Inc
Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision -- "The Network Is The
Computer" -- has propelled Sun Microsystems Inc to its position as a leading
provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that make the
Net work. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the World Wide
Web at sun.com/.
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