Power Processing for All

Jan 24th, 2008

Clusters open high-performance systems to new users — if you set them up right

UNCLE SAM, as a personification of the United States, first started making the rounds during the War of 1812. Uncle Sim is a somewhat more recent incarnation.

Uncle Sim is the nickname given to researchers running simulations at locations such as the Aeronautical Systems Center Major Shared Resource Center (ASC MSRC) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. The three supercomputers at the site have explored how the weapons systems on Virginia-class submarines respond to deep-sea pressures, how to protect Humvees from improvised explosive devices, and what conditions send an F-22 fighter jet into a flat spin.

“We can do that much better with simulation than we are able to do with test-and-evaluation or wind-tunnel testing,” said Jeff Graham, ASC MSRC’s technical director.

As part of the Defense Department’s High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP), ASC receives a new supercomputer every two years and retires the oldest system. In October, it added a 9,216-processorcore SGI Altix 4700 system running Red Hat Linux with 20T of shared memory and 440T of usable disk space. Delivering more than 60 teraflops, it raises the center’s capacity to 85 teraflops — more than triple what was available previously.

“We’ve been doing these technology insertions for seven years,” Graham said. “A lot of the lessons learned have been integrated into the [request for proposals] that goes out every year.”

Continue reading at Government Computing News