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The UF Office of Information Technology Newsletter | |
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HPC - Computation for the Gator Nation | |
Processing, analyzing, communicating, and displaying gigabytes-to-terabytes of data routinely with extremely low latency is an
increasingly critical challenge to cutting-edge research in many areas of science and engineering. The University of Florida's High
Performance Computer Center (HPC) exists to meet this challenge. This effort is being led by the University's HPC Committee, composed
of faculty members, under the auspices of the Office of Information Technology.
Installed originally in October 2004 the HPC is housed in the Physics building and is a compilation of computers and peripherals that enables investigators to do research outside of the confines of systems that are primarily used for administrative purposes.
The HPC at UF is the lead institution of GriPhyN, The Grid for Physics Network, which evolved into the Open Science Grid. Here scientists are trying to figure out how to use computer systems, mostly clusters of computers, spread all over the world to work together on massive number crunching and data analysis projects. Using distributed computer clusters for solving a single problem is called grid computing.
To enable grid computing, high bandwidth networks must be built connecting different institutions. UF is part of the Florida Lambda Rail (FLR) consortium and houses the FLR network operations center at Computing and Networking Services (CNS) . The FLR is part of the National Lambda Rail . The University also partners with Caltech, University of California-San Diego and the University of Wisconsin-Madison on DISUN (Data Intensive Science University Network) to study the fundamental properties of particles and forces by providing access to data from the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Geneva, Switzerland.
Phase One of the HPC consisted of a 200-node Dell cluster and was operational by Fall 2004. Processing and research ran for over a year
and then it was turned off in preparation for Phase Two. The new system installed in December 2005 is capable of four times the original
computer power of the Dell cluster while not requiring any more floor space or any additional special cooling for this additional
processing power.
In addition, Infiniband connections (10 gigabit per second) were used instead of the traditional Gigabit Ethernet. Funding for this system came from faculty investments and administrative matching funds as well as an equipment grant from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) program of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and special discounts and grants from Rackable Systems Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc.
The High Performance Computer Center puts the University of Florida in the forefront for computer-intensive research and enables the University to be associated with many prominent projects.
UF leads research in virtual grids called In-VIGO, a distributed environment where multiple application
instances can coexist in virtual or physical resources, such that users are unaware of the complexities inherent to grid
computing.
Many centers and institutes on campus own and operate their own clusters. The goal of the HPC is to build a campus wide grid around the Phase Two cluster using the 10 GigaBit reserach network funded by the NSR MRI grant. This will allow UF researchers to get their work done on some computing resource on campus without worrying about the details of which machine was used.
Those interested in the High Performance Computing Center can visit their website or talk with Erik Deumens for more information. To get an account to use the HPC visit their website at http://hpc.ufl.edu/Documentation/Accounts.html and select the link UF HPC Cluster Accounts. GatorLink authentication is necessary.
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