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RCAC opens up opportunistic access to 11 TFlops for TeraGrid users

July 21, 2005

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. -- Rosen Center for Advanced Computing (RCAC) at Purdue University has opened up access to 11 teraflops of computing power to the TeraGrid community. Based on a new model known as "community clusters," developed by researchers at RCAC, this new computing resource will be accessible to TeraGrid researchers and educators using Condor. The community clusters currently supported by RCAC include a 1024 Xeon 64-bit (Irwindale) processor cluster, a 194 Opteron 64-bit processor cluster with InfiniBand interconnects, and a 618 Xeon 32-bit processor cluster — a combined capacity of 11 TFlops.

Community clustering is an innovative idea gaining significant momentum in the national and international cyberinfrastructure community. Under this model, researchers pool funds to contribute cluster nodes that are centrally managed by RCAC. In return, researchers get guaranteed access to the machines they purchased as well as access to any unused cluster nodes owned by other researchers. The community clusters have dedicated queues for each resource owner as well as a preemptive queue that can access any idle computational power of the cluster even nodes that researchers don't own. Backfilled by Condor, the remaining unused cycles are available to the general user community. TeraGrid jobs are routed to these clusters via a Condor job manager installed on Purdue's TeraGrid Globus gatekeeper.

"Faculty members are increasingly receiving funding through grants or startup packages to deploy their own supercomputers. These dedicated resources can be bundled together to create significant computational power. But these resources are not used all the time and a resource sharing mechanism needs to be defined to allow access to other users local or national. We have taken a first step towards true resource sharing and grid computing by deploying a condor job manager for TeraGrid users. Even though no cycles are guaranteed, we believe that significant scientific discovery and learning can be enabled through the use of the community cluster model," said Dr. Sebastien Goasguen, Senior Research Scientist and the TeraGrid Site Lead at Purdue University.

Dr. Gerhard Klimeck, the Technical Director of the NSF-funded Network for Computational Nanotechnology noted, "For my research in computational nanotechnology I need dedicated access to computing power. However, when my students or I are not using the machine I am glad to share it with anyone. The community cluster model put in place by RCAC is excellent and I have an incentive to invest in it. Giving back to the TeraGrid community through my unused cycles is a very obvious and practical thing to do."

Non-Purdue researchers can access to this new resource through the TeraGrid by requesting access via the POPS system at www.paci.org. Ideal applications for this environment are ones that require large numbers of single-processor runs. For more information, please see Purdue's TeraGrid resources page http://www.purdue.teragrid.org or send an email to: rcac-info@purdue.edu.

About Rosen Center for Advanced Computing (RCAC)
The Rosen Center for Advanced Computing (RCAC) is a research computing center at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana. It is named in memory of Saul Rosen who served as director of Purdue's Computing Center from 1968 to 1987, and who helped to establish Purdue as a pioneering academic institution in high performance computing. RCAC is a component of Information Technology at Purdue — the central IT organization at Purdue University. RCAC, through its role in the TeraGrid project, provides advanced computing resources and services to support the computationally intensive research nationwide. RCAC also conducts its own research and development to enhance and extend the capabilities of these resources.

About TeraGrid
TeraGrid is an open scientific discovery infrastructure combining leadership class resources at eight partner sites to create an integrated, persistent computational resource. Deployment of TeraGrid was completed in September 2004, bringing over 50 teraflops of computing power and nearly 2 petabytes of rotating storage, and specialized data analysis and visualization resources into production, interconnected at 10-30 gigabits/second via a dedicated national network.

Contact

Dr. Sebastien Goasguen, Purdue University
sebgoa@purdue.edu, 765.494.9782

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