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released
March 22, 2000
Contacts
Karen Green
Public Information Officer
kareng@ncsa.uiuc.edu
217.265.0748 phone
217.244.7396 fax
Margaret Lewis
MHPCC
mlewis@mhpcc.edu
808.879.5077 ext 249
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ALBUQUERQUE, NM -- The National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance)
will take delivery of a 512-processor Linux supercluster within the next
month—a move that will give this nationwide partnership the largest open
production Linux supercluster aimed at the research community. The new
supercluster, called LosLobos, will be located at the University of New
Mexico's (UNM) Albuquerque High Performance Computing Center (AHPCC), one
of the Alliance Partners for Advanced Computational Resources sites.
"The Linux movement benefits greatly from the strong support of top
researchers and programmers at our nation's leading universities and
laboratories," said Irving Wladawsky-Berger, Vice President, Technology &
Strategy, IBM Enterprise Systems Group. "The innovation of the Alliance,
supported by the research community, will lead the way for commercial Linux
applications and product development."
LosLobos will consist of 256 IBM Netfinity PC Servers. The 733 MHz Intel
IA-32 processor based computer system is expected to provide a peak
theoretical performance of about 375 gigaflops. The high performance
interconnect network between the cluster nodes will be Myricom's Myrinet,
providing speeds exceeding 1 gigabit per second, which is comparable to
the fastest interconnects in today's traditional supercomputers.
This new supercluster will increase the computing capabilities of the
Alliance, a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded partnership, providing
researchers with a platform for developing improved cluster management
tools. It will also offer the research community the chance to gain
operational experience on large-scale clusters, and to explore the
scalability of different types of science and engineering applications.
"The Alliance is committed to leading the effort to develop and deploy
large clusters to the scientific research community," said Dan Reed,
director of the Alliance. "LosLobos represents the synthesis of two major
trends in the scientific and research community: open source software and
commodity high performance cluster computing. Open source software, such as
Linux, decreases costs dramatically because the community of users
continually augments the software base. In addition, superclusters made
from off-the-shelf products are a very cost effective way to offer
supercomputer performance to the user community."
Unlike previous superclusters made of commodity computers, LosLobos will
integrate new advanced management tools, such as the Maui Scheduler, into
its array of services. The Maui Scheduler, developed by UNM's Maui High
Performance Computing Center (MHPCC), will integrate scheduling and
reservation capabilities into the cluster, decreasing queue wait times and
allowing easier access to a larger percentage of computing resources.
LosLobos will be a part of the Alliance's Virtual Machine Room, which is
the national infrastructure for geographically distributed computing.
"Superclusters are becoming supercomputers in their own right," noted Frank
Gilfeather, executive director of the High Performance Computing,
Educational and Research Center (HPCERC) at the University of New Mexico.
"Many researchers are now using smaller clusters for research development,
and are then turning to superclusters for large-scale computations. Develop
research locally, then seamlessly run globally using open source software
developed to support specific research disciplines is the model that will
bring high performance computing to a broader base of researchers."
LosLobos represents a major trend in supercomputing—a moderately priced
entry point into high performance computing that offers the enhanced
performance required by scientific and engineering applications. The IBM
supercluster system will be delivered in mid-April, and the Alliance will
begin to allocate time nationally on the system this summer. The Alliance
currently offers a 128-processor Linux supercluster, RoadRunner, also
located at AHPCC, and a 416-processor supercluster primarily used with
Windows NT at its leading-edge site, the National Center for Supercomputing
Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The Alliance is a partnership to prototype an advanced computational
infrastructure for the 21st century and includes more than 50 academic,
government and industry research partners from across the United States.
The Alliance is one of two partnerships funded by the NSF's Partnerships
for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program, and receives cost
sharing at partner institutions. NSF also supports the National Partnership
for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), led by the San Diego
Supercomputer Center.
NCSA is the leading-edge site for the Alliance. NCSA is a leader in the
development and deployment of cutting-edge high-performance computing,
networking, and information technologies. NSF, the state of Illinois, the
University of Illinois, industrial partners, and other federal agencies
fund NCSA.
HPCERC, a strategic center of the University of New Mexico, is a partner of
the Alliance, and its two supercomputing centers, AHPCC and the MHPCC, are
SuperNodes on the PACI Grid. AHPCC and MHPCC are supported through grants
and contracts from the Air Force Research Laboratory, the Department of
Defense, NSF, other government agencies, and commercial contracts.
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