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Research Support

Upgrade of Convex C3840

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Network & Academic Computing Services will soon upgrade the Convex C3840, the principal NACS numerical computation server, to a Hewlett-Packard Exemplar SPP2000 with 16 CPUs and 2 Gigabytes of memory. The SPP2000 will provide more than ten times the computing performance of the C3840 and will provide a comprehensive parallel computing environment for the first time within NACS for research and educational applications.

Major application software currently on the C3840 will also be available on the SPP2000 including MARC/MENTAT, Gaussian-94, GCG, and IMSL. In addition to these applications and compilers (Fortran90, C and C++), the new machine will have MPI (Message Passing Interface) and PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine), two widely used libraries for developing parallel applications based on message-passing. The Global Shared Memory (GSM) model for developing parallel applications is also supported in Fortran90. Assistance from NACS will be available to the current users of the C3840 for migration of their user-developed computer codes to the new machine.

NACS will be offering a variety of workshops and other educational opportunities on parallel computing using the SPP2000 in coming months. Please check the NACS Web page to obtain the latest information about the SPP2000. For additional information, please send e-mail to NACS@UCI.EDU, or contact Donald Frederick of NACS, FREDERIK@UCI.EDU or (949) 824-3200.

UCI Acquires 38 Powerful Unix Workstations

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Last month, UCI took delivery of 38 Digital Equipment Corporation AlphaStation 200 workstations. The workstations were acquired at substantially less than the normal educational price through a campus-wide purchase coordinated by NACS. The systems have 64 MB of RAM memory, 2 GB of disk space, and CPUs that run at 233 Mhz; they will be used for a variety of research and other purposes at UCI. NACS will be creating a new campus-wide graduate student computing service using 9 of the AlphaStations. The new workstations will also provide a platform for gaining additional parallel computing cluster experience at UCI.

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