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February 23, 2007
University of Buffalo Upgrades HPC Resources
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Over the past year, the University at Buffalo's Center for Computational Research has quadrupled computing power, upgraded its high-performance storage system and installed a new state-of-the-art visualization room.
If that wasn't enough, it also moved its entire infrastructure, including a 2,000-processor supercomputer, from the university's North Campus into UB's New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus in downtown Buffalo. And CCR users noticed barely a hiccup in service.
Made possible by major investments in CCR by UB and the Center of Excellence during the past year, CCR's computing power has jumped from three teraflops (one teraflop equals a trillion operations per second) to 13 teraflops. Storage has been upgraded to nearly 30 terabytes.
While CCR staff and users enjoy the increases in power, as well as the center's new home, Thomas R. Furlani, CCR's director, says the real dividend from the move has come from new synergies it is generating with researchers in the Center of Excellence and its partners, Roswell Park Cancer Institute and the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute.
"The CCR staff has increased dramatically its interactions with medical researchers since the recent move and this has been highly beneficial to Buffalo's life-sciences projects," said Bruce A. Holm, senior vice provost and executive director of the Center of Excellence. "Dr. Furlani has done an outstanding job of educating our researchers about the possibilities open to them via CCR resources, and we are now seeing an increase in NIH (National Institutes of Health) grant applications that include CCR staff and services as part of their budgets."
At the same time, CCR is making sure that the needs of its existing users, many of whom work on the North Campus, remain a priority. Taking advantage of the boost in power are some of CCR's longest-standing users, who conduct research in fields ranging from computational chemistry and environmental modeling and simulation to earthquake engineering and anthropology.
CCR staffs full-time satellite offices on the North Campus in 107 Bell Hall and 331 Natural Sciences Complex.
Some of the newest North Campus users will be putting CCR machines to a major test later this year. UB high-energy particle physicists Avto Kharchilava and Karl Ecklund will use the center's supercomputers to help analyze the massive amounts of data that will be produced by the Compact Muon Spectrometer experiment at the CERN accelerator in Geneva later this year.
Since the move downtown, and partly as a result of energetic outreach efforts by CCR staff, existing partnerships with local medical institutions have intensified and become more productive, especially with the increase in computing power. CCR recently added a dozen or so new users, primarily in the life sciences.
Ironically, in a field so driven by virtual connections, sheer physical proximity to one's collaborators has turned out to be a terrific asset for researchers in specific disciplines. Daniel Gaile, UB assistant professor of biostatistics whose office in the Center of Excellence is steps away from CCR, has noticed the change.
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