Special Features:
SUN, STREAMLINE BUILD 3 TERAFLOP GRID FOR UNIV. OF
NOTTINGHAM
The University of Nottingham announced the selection of Sun Microsystems and
Streamline Computing to build a multi-million pound 500-plus node central
compute Grid which will provide the university with three teraflops of peak
computational performance. The new Grid built using AMD Opteron processor-
based Sun Fire V20z servers, will rank as the second largest academic computer
system in Europe to date, and the eighth largest worldwide. Application
development and deployment tools from Allinea Software, the new spin-out of
Streamline, will complement established tools such as Sun Grid Engine to
provide the University of Nottingham with a complete and fully-integrated
hardware and software solution.
The new Grid can allow university academic staff to complete a year's work
in
just a single day, significantly speeding up the time it takes to complete
research and roll out new innovations. The Grid offers the equivalent of
several thousand standard desktop PCs and will help allow academics with large
amounts of scientific data to process hundreds of analysis jobs
simultaneously, vastly increasing the speed and efficiency of their research
work. For example, the Grid will allow the university's School of Chemistry to
study molecules and systems that were previously too complicated to
contemplate, with some calculations being performed 100 times faster than
currently possible.
Frazer Pearce in the University of Nottingham's School of Physics and
Astronomy, who is leading the Grid project and who will himself be using the
supercomputer to model the evolution of the universe, commented, "The real
universe took several billion years to evolve. This new machine is so powerful
we can replay that in a few hours. The computer revolution has well and truly
arrived and the aim is to ensure that these facilities are available to
non-traditional users of advanced computer technology as well as to those
working in science and engineering."
"It's thrilling for Sun to be able to help academic organizations undertake
this kind of research," said John Fowler, executive vice president at Sun
Microsystems. "Typically, we focus on how Sun's Grid technology helps
organizations reduce IT costs and capital expenditures, improve asset
utilization, and gain more computing agility. That's all still true for the
University of Nottingham, but enabling researchers to reproduce the evolution
of the universe is a particularly gratifying use of Grid computing. We're very
happy to be helping the university increase its depth, breadth and quantity of
groundbreaking scientific research using the new Grid's compute power."
Funded as part of a successful bid to the U.K. Government's Science and
Research Investment Fund (SRIF), this central Grid facility will complement
existing Sun powered departmental Grids, offering the capability for multiple
research departments. Over 20 schools within the university are already signed
up to use the Grid, including the Schools of Humanities, Geography, Sociology
and Social Policy, Psychology, Civil Engineering, Nursing and Medical and
Surgical Sciences. Agriculture and Food Science researchers based at the
university's Sutton Bonington campus will also have access. Members of the
university staff will have access to the Grid directly from their desktop,
through "clone" systems in each school.
The University of Nottingham has a number of commercial relationships with
companies including Rolls Royce, Jaguar and Boots. These organizations are
already taking advantage of the University's current Grid resources. The
introduction of this larger Grid allows for further development of these and
other commercial relationships, and helps open up an alternative source of
funding for the University.
"We are delighted to continue our relationship with the University of
Nottingham, where we have had a significant presence for several years," said
Michael Rudgyard, founder of Streamline Computing Ltd and the new managing
director of Allinea Software. "Sun and Streamline have worked together on a
number of very large Grid projects in both academic and commercial sectors.
The alliance has an established track record for delivering reliable and
cost-effective systems, with outstanding on-going support. With the formation
of Allinea Software, which will exploit and evolve the technologies that
Streamline has been developing over recent years, we welcome the opportunity
to demonstrate how the three companies can provide an end-to-end solution to
the University."
The new Grid comprises more than 500 2.2 Ghz Sun Fire V20z systems based on
the AMD Opteron processor Model 250 (2.4 GHz) in the central cluster, 3com
Gigabit switched architecture, Sun Grid Engine Enterprise Edition for advanced
remote scheduling of compute processes, Streamline's Cluster Management &
Administration (CMA) tool, Allinea's Distributed Debugging Tool (DDT) and
Optimization and Profiling Tool (OPT) as well as the Score cluster system that
offers low latency, high bandwidth MPI performance over Gigabit Ethernet.
The University of Nottingham has recently applied to become an Engineering
and
Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Centre of Learning. EPSRC is the UK
Government's leading funding agency for research and training in engineering
and the physical sciences, aimed at establishing 20 elite scholarships per
annum to specialize in High Performance Computing (HPC) development. It is
hoped that the new Grid implementation will enhance the University's
application.
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 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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