University upgrades SGI computing capacity

A new 64-processor SGI computer from Silicon Graphics Inc. will be delivered to Andrews Information Systems Building on April 22 and should be available to university researchers within 30 days, announced Terry Herdman, director of research computing.

Last spring, a new 16-processor SGI came on line at Virginia Tech, and has been used to capacity by university researchers. "The College of Science has made a lot of use of it, particularly chemistry," Herdman said. As a result, the Office of the Vice President for Information Technology, Office of the Vice President for Research, College of Science, and Department of Mathematics have invested in the upgrade of the SGI system.

The 64-processor SGI is the Altix 3700 Bx2 system, which leverages Intel’s 1.6GHz Itanium® 2 processors with 9MB cache. The systems use SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server 9 for its operating system.

"This continues Virginia Tech's commitment to high performance computing," Herdman said. "The SGI complements what we already have."

The SGI differs in two important ways from System X. It has shared memory to supplement the parallel computing Unix/Mac platform of System X. And SGI supports a variety of third-party software.

"A lot of people use off-the-shelf software like this machine because they can continue to use programs with which they are familiar," Herdman said. "It doesn't require them to write new code."

The university has purchased an introductory visualization package that will help researchers produce flat-screen visualizations of their work. Other software available on the SGI includes Abaqus, Gaussian, GASP, and Mathematica. "We are also looking at Matlab and SAS," said Kevin Shinpaugh, director of research and cluster computing, "And researchers may request other software."

The system also includes two compiler software packages -- Compilers: Intel® compilers for Linux* (C/C++, Fortran) and GNU Compiler Collection (C, Fortran 77), and several library software packages, including SGI Message Passing Toolkit (MPT), Scientific Computing Software Library (SCSL), Flexible File Input/Output (FFIO), CPU sets and memory placement, Intel® Math Kernel Library (MKL), and Intel® Integrated Performance Primitives (IPP).

For time on the new SGI please go online and fill out the “User Account Application Form.” For more information e-mail Shinpaugh or call him at (540) 231-1246.

There are other, smaller and older SGI systems on campus, and one very large system that just arrived at the Andrews Information Systems Building.

When U.S. Department of Defense supercomputers are more than five years old, they are replaced under the terms of the federal government's High Performance Computing Modernization Program. But their usefulness is far from over. This winter, the agency invited researchers to write proposals to take over several five-year old computers. Virginia Tech's Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering submitted a strong proposal, and was awarded a machine that has been known to the DOD as "Sard."

The supercomputer has been delivered to the Andrews Information Systems building and is in the process of being set up. Sard has 512 processors, 512 gigabytes of RAM, and will run the IRIX operating system. It is housed in 18 refrigerator-sized racks, weighs several tons, and consumes approximately 50 kilowatts of electricity during normal operation.

AOE will be responsible for the maintenance and administration of Sard, and the computer's substantial number-crunching power will be directed toward the large-dataset needs of researchers in that department.

Meanwhile, the new 64-processor SGI will appeal to researchers from many departments, Herdman said.