December 08, 2006
Indiana University (IU) has deployed Force10 Networks TeraScale E-Series family of switch/routers to build a distributed, high performance cyberinfrastructure. In addition to IU's AVIDD and Big Red supercomputer clusters, the cyberinfrastructure includes the university's Data Capacitor, which provides researchers across the nation with a unique facility for temporary massive data storage. Indiana University serves as one of the nine partner sites in TeraGrid, an open scientific discovery infrastructure that integrates high performance computers, data resources, tools and leading experimental facilities around the country to create a persistent computational resource.
"To support broad research initiatives across our campuses as well as within the TeraGrid project, we needed an infrastructure that could deliver the flexibility and scalability that would allow us to interconnect our computing clusters as well as enable us to build new ones," said Matt Davy, chief network engineer at Indiana University. "Force10's 16-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet cards give us the flexibility to reconfigure our network as research projects demand without complicating the architecture while providing the scalability to add more computing capacity."
The Force10 TeraScale E-Series and the state of Indiana's I-Light network form the foundation of the high performance 10 Gigabit Ethernet network that connects IU's Indianapolis and Bloomington campuses, which are 55 miles apart. The Force10 TeraScale E-Series also serves as a "machine room backplane" for IU's two Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Facilities. Over this infrastructure, tools such as an open message passing interface (MPI) can be used to run MPI applications across multiple locations, supporting, for example, the use of Myricom protocols within one cluster and Gigabit Ethernet between clusters and campuses, using the long haul fiber optic capabilities of the TeraScale E-Series. The machine room backplane also allows researchers to utilize systems such as the IBM e1350 Blade Center Big Red cluster to generate massive amounts of data that can be stored on the Data Capacitor while awaiting analysis.
"Indiana University is a part of the research and education tradition that is committed to leveraging the most advanced technology to further research into complex problems," said Mark Cooper, senior vice president of worldwide sales at Force10 Networks. "The TeraScale E-Series provides the density and reliability Indiana requires to be on the forefront of computer science research."
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Today at the International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzing, Germany, Jack Dongarra presented on a proposed benchmark that could carry a bit more weight than its older Linpack companion. The high performance conjugate gradient (HPCG) concept takes into account new architectures for new applications, while shedding the floating point....
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The world's largest supercomputers, like Tianhe-2, are great at traditional, compute-intensive HPC workloads, such as simulating atomic decay or modeling tornados. But data-intensive applications--such as mining big data sets for connections--is a different sort of workload, and runs best on a different sort of computer.
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For all the progress we've made in IT over the last 50 years, there's one area of life that has steadfastly eluded the grasp of computers: understanding human language. Now, researchers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) are utilizing a Hadoop cluster on its Longhorn supercomputer to move the state of the art of language processing a little bit further.
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Titan, the Cray XK7 at the Oak Ridge National Lab that debuted last fall as the fastest supercomputer in the world with 17.59 petaflops of sustained computing power, will rely on its previous LINPACK test for the upcoming edition of the Top 500 list.
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