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High Performance Computing

Cluster Computing

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NACS hosts and manages the Middle Performance Computing (MPC) “Beowulf” Cluster on behalf of campus researchers who need substantial computational power.

MPC comprises private nodes and shared nodes, including a part-time shared cluster using NACS PC lab systems. MPC systems feature a mix of architectures to provide high computational throughput.

A feature of the MPC service is the opportunity for researchers to join their own systems to the cluster. In exchange for system administration, housing, and 24/7 oversight provided by NACS, researchers allow 25% of their systems to be configured as part of a campus computational resource. (The remaining 75% is configured to be a cluster, or “queue”, dedicated to the owner.) Contributors may, of course, make use of systems designated for campus use.

Contributors also become voting members of the MPC Advisory Board. The purpose of the MPCAB is to advise NACS on the governance, policies, procedures, and technical aspects of the MPC cluster.

Researchers may request accounts on MPC (and other NACS resources) online. Any future changes that impact MPC users will be posted on the MPC website.

NACS also hosts the GradEA Beowulf Cluster for the exclusive use of UCI graduate students.

MPC web site:
http://www.nacs.uci.edu/computing/mpc/

MPC account requests:
http://www.nacs.uci.edu/rcs/resources.html

GradEA web site:
http://www.nacs.uci.edu/computing/gradea/

Grad Student Computing Cluster

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NACS provides and supports various computing resources and services for the UCI community. One noteworthy computing resource, GradEA, has been developed for the exclusive use of UCI graduate students. The intent is to provide graduate students with access to high-speed CPUs, large-data storage capacity, and advanced software.

GradEA consists of 11 dual-CPU Intel Xeon 2.0 GHz nodes, running the Red Hat Linux 8.0 operating system. The most recent hardware upgrade to GradEA occurred in January of this year and more are planned for the coming year. Software available on GradEA includes: Mathematica 4.2, MATLAB 6.5, IDL 5.4, SAS, IMSL, S+/R, the Portland Group compiler suite, MPICH (aka MPI) and Open PBS.

Programs on GradEA can be run in a single, or multi-CPU mode; the cluster network is interconnected by Gigabit ethernet. Users also have access to a disk-storage workspace of 700GB (Gigabytes).

By default, all graduate students have accounts on the GradEA cluster; try logging into gradea.uci.edu with your UCInetID and password. Further information is available at: http://www.nacs.uci.edu/computing/gradea

Powerful new SGI Origin in Mathematics

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Professor Alexander Figotin of the UCI Mathematics Department has recently acquired a new SGI Origin2000 computer to provide the main computing resource for his research. The machine has been named “krein.math.uci.edu” after one of the most eminent mathematicians of our time, Mark Grigorievich Krein, who made many fundamental contributions in functional analysis and its applications. The system currently has 24 MIPS R10000 CPUs (soon to be upgraded to SGI’s latest and most powerful CPU, the MIPS R12000), 6 GBytes of memory and 54 GBytes of disk space. The Origin2000 scalable shared memory architecture has been optimized for parallel programs using either shared memory or the message-passing model. Extensive software development tools, including the C/C++ and Fortran90 compilers, are available with special features for developing efficient parallel programs.

The acquisition of this powerful new computer was funded from a Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) grant, along with campus and School of Physical Sciences matching funds. It is being jointly supported by the school and NACS. Professor Figotin’s research involves the calculation of electromagnetic spectral properties of photonic crystals.

Contact Don Frederick (Frederik@UCI.EDU) or Professor Figotin (Figotin@UCI.EDU) for more information about this acquisition.

High Performance Computing at UCI

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On December 19th, NACS met with a cross-section of campus faculty “consumers” of High Performance Computing (HPC) to discuss the current state of HPC at UCI. The group included approximately 25 researchers from fields that have historically dominated use of HPC – engineering, chemistry, physics and biological sciences.

HPC refers to significantly faster “number crunching” power than desktop computers are capable of. Contemporary HPC machines can perform hundreds of millions of “flops” (Floating Point Operations Per Second); a typical 200 MHz Pentium PC peaks at about 70 Mflops.

Currently, UCI supports HPC in various ways – by purchasing time at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) on the Cray C98 vector machine (7,600 Mflops) and on the Cray T3E massively parallel processor (MPP). NACS also provides access to UCI’s own aging HPC system – a 4 vector CPU Convex C3840 (480 Mflops).

The participants at the December meeting engaged in a lively give-and-take discussion. All agreed upon the importance of the UCI network and of the support given to the faculty and their research group by NACS’ Departmental and Distributed Computing Support group (DDCS). There were differences of opinion about the role of NACS in providing other HPC resources to the UCI community, with some speakers advocating the need for a centrally-managed facility, such as a workstation cluster, or central multi-processor shared memory machine. Others felt that the days of “big-iron” had ended. UCI is not unique in this respect – discussions of this type are going on at many other universities.

If you are interested in participating in discussions about HPC and computational science at UCI, please let us know by sending e-mail to “AAG@UCI.EDU” . For more information on HPC at UCI, please take a look at the following Web page:

http://www.nacs.uci.edu/computing/researchresources.html