HPCwire: NY Supercomputer 'Magic' Available Worldwide

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April 06, 2009

NY Supercomputer 'Magic' Available Worldwide

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HWI, UB scientist in partnership with NVIDIA and Dell rolls out "Magic" to worldwide users

BUFFALO, NY, April 6 -- Local scientist Dr. Russ Miller is leading the rollout of "Magic," one of the most powerful computers in New York State to qualified users worldwide for solving computationally-demanding problems.

New Methods Allow Scholars to Address Previously Unsolvable Problems

Cyberinfrastructure sits at the core of modern simulation and modeling, which creates new methods of investigation that allow scholars to address previously unsolvable problems, according to Miller who holds scientific appointments at both Hauptman-Woodward as a senior scientist and at the University at Buffalo as a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering. The Miller Cyberinfrastructure Laboratory (MCIL) is taking advantage of recent advances in technologies in order to link distributed resources, including compute systems, data storage devices, visualization systems, sensors, and a wide variety of instruments and make those resources available worldwide.

"The work done by Dr. Miller's group, which was supported by an NSF grant that also providing funding to Niagara University (NU) provided us with the opportunity to acquire significant computing power and skills. It also allowed us to train students on creating and utilizing modern computing platforms," Dr. Mary McCourt, chair and professor of Chemistry at NU, said. "We are excited to have immediate access to this new state-of-the-art computing system, which enhances the resources of Niagara's Academic Center for Integrated Sciences."

"We have been working on grid computing efforts with Russ and his group for years," Dr. Charles M. Weeks, senior research scientist at HWI, said. "These efforts have resulted in a number of joint research and funding efforts. We are particularly anxious to experiment with this new trend in high-performance computing as part of one of our jointly funded projects, especially for some of HWI's computationally demanding applications."

Project History

The Miller Cyberinfrastructure Laboratory (MCIL) was founded at the beginning of the 21st century by Miller who is widely recognized as a leader in parallel computing, grid computing, and cyberinfrastructure. Miller served as Founding Director of the UB Center for Computational Research (CCR) from 1998-2006. Under Miller's direction, and with primary funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH), a Buffalo-based grid was developed as an experimental way to create an institutionally-distributed platform that integrated information and computing. This led to the design, implementation, and deployment of the Western New York Grid (WNY Grid), which aggregated costly computational resources at institutions throughout WNY. The overwhelming success of the WNY Grid led to the MCIL-deployed New York State Grid (NYS Grid), based on the Open Science Grid set of grid software.

Magic is a state-of-the-art computer system located at UB's North Campus which consists of graphics processing units typically reserved for high-end gaming systems that are integrated into a traditional rack of computers. Magic was delivered in late 2008 and is now available to users worldwide. The system is cost-effective in solving large computational problems in areas including bioinformatics, computational chemistry, computational fluid dynamics, computational finance, medical imaging, weather and ocean modeling.

Why Is This Important?

Led by Miller, MCIL worked on platforms for monitoring grid systems, for providing a single point-of-entry portal and for solving intricate problems involving node swapping, predictive scheduling and resource management. MCIL has been responsible for grid-enabling critical applications in areas such as structural biology, bioinformatics, ground water modeling, earthquake engineering and computational chemistry.

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