Game lets geeks compete to build virtual supercomputer

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — For those ready to get their geek on, Purdue University has created the computer game for you.

Rack-A-Node is an online video game that lets those über-geeks who love both science and technology try their hand at designing and operating a simulated research supercomputer.

Purdue University has created a game designed to teach how to build and operate a supercomputer. Called "Rack-A-Node," the game lets players design a supercomputer and then try to keep it operating as science jobs are submitted. (Purdue University image/Michele Rund)

The online game can be found at http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/rackanode/

Players build a cluster supercomputer using a variety of computing types to run science experiments. A player begins with a small supercomputer and receives science jobs to process. If these jobs are successful, the player receives funding needed to build an even bigger supercomputer.

The game requires the player to optimize the supercomputer to deal with waves of science jobs that are submitted.

“Like the game ‘rock, paper, scissors,’ certain tools perform better against certain challenges,” Bowen says. “In Rack-A-Node, the player has to optimize the supercomputer for the type of science being performed.”

For example, the game begins with a chemistry job that requires a lot of memory, then a climate-modeling job, which is a high throughput task that needs faster network communication. Later, a 3-D science animation-rendering job requires multiple nodes to process. The game also includes jobs from life sciences, pharmacy, physics and engineering.

“Supercomputing is not the most accessible of topics. It can be difficult to understand,” Bowen says. “We worked with a research scientist in Information Technology at Purdue to make sure the game is fairly realistic but still fun to play.”

The game was built to highlight Purdue’s student team participating in the Cluster Challenge at the SC ‘08 supercomputer conference on Nov. 15-21 in Austin, Texas. University teams compete in the challenge to see who can build the best supercomputer in a day.

In this year’s Cluster Challenge, the students will work with constraints on the amount of electricity they can use. Purdue’s team has partnered with SiCortex, a manufacturer of low-energy supercomputers. This summer Purdue was the first university to install a low-energy SiCortex supercomputer.

“Rack-A-Node is a game that captures the essence of the supercomputer challenge,” Bowen says.

Purdue’s Steele supercomputer makes list of world’s most powerful systems

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Purdue’s Steele supercomputing cluster is among the most powerful high-performance computing systems in the world, according to rankings released Tuesday (Nov. 18) at the SuperComputing ‘08 conference in Austin, Texas.

The Top 500 Supercomputer Sites project has been ranking the 500 most powerful known computer systems twice a year since 1993 as a way of detecting and tracking trends in high-performance computing. Steele placed 105th on the latest list. Purdue ranked 319th in November 2007.

Steele ranked first among the Big Ten universities with systems on the list. Indiana’s Big Red cluster was at 148, and Minnesota had two entries that rank 268th and 356th. The Steele cluster is operated by Purdue’s Rosen Center for Advanced Computing, the research and discovery arm of Information Technology at Purdue, the university’s central information technology organization.

Gerry McCartney, Purdue’s vice president for information technology and chief information officer, said Steele’s showing was important not so much for where it puts Purdue on the Top 500 list as for the trend it indicates.

“The ranking of our new supercomputer, Steele, is just another indicator that Purdue is improving its position in the high-performance computing world. Our approach is drawing attention at the conference and of media,” McCartney said. “Of course, we don’t do this to see how high we can score on lists such as the Top 500. We do this to enable our scientists and engineers to stay at the forefront of discovery in crucial areas such as cancer research, global warming and the lack of affordable energy.”

Purdue is determined to continue enhancing the high-performance computing resources it provides for research and economic development purposes across the state, McCartney said.

Many people on the Purdue campus can take some of the credit for Steele’s placement on the list, announced at the premier international gathering for high-performance computing, networking, storage and analysis. Steele is a “community cluster,” funded by combining faculty grant and lab start-up funds and money from institutional sources.

Each “owner” gets a share of the computing power in the machine based on investment and the opportunity to tap more when they need from the shares of other users idle at the time.

“We built a top 500 machine by working collaboratively with the faculty,” said John Campbell, the associate vice president for information technology who heads the Rosen Center. “This machine is all about pulling together a diverse set of people, utilizing a variety of funding and sharing resources.”

Resources like Steele are integral to the research of Purdue faculty members who helped pay for the cluster, like Gerhard Klimeck, an electrical and computer engineering professor who models the next two or three generations of nanoscale electronic devices, allowing their properties to be understood long before they’re ever fabricated.

More than 250 staff members and volunteers assembled the cluster in a single Monday morning in May. Some of them even came from Purdue’s diehard in-state athletic rival Indiana, attracted by the idea of a high-tech barn raising to undertake a process that normally takes weeks.

Campbell noted that Steele recently averaged 87 percent owner utilization and more than 98 percent utilization overall.

That’s one reason the Rosen Center already is planning Purdue’s next community cluster, to be built in the spring of 2009. Faculty and campus organizations interested in participating in the new cluster, to be called Coates, can find more information online at http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/userinfo/resources/coates/

Tiny refrigerator taking shape to cool future computers

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Researchers at Purdue University are developing a miniature refrigeration system small enough to fit inside laptops and personal computers, a cooling technology that would boost performance while shrinking the size of computers.

Researchers at Purdue are developing a miniature refrigeration system small enough to fit inside laptops and personal computers, a cooling technology that would boost performance while shrinking the size of computers. The researchers collect data using a myriad of sensors to precisely measure how a refrigerant boils and vaporizes inside tiny “microchannels” in a part of the refrigeration system called an evaporator. Data are needed to determine how to vary this boiling rate for maximum chip cooling. Eckhard Groll, at left, a professor of mechanical engineering, and Suresh Garimella, the R. Eugene and Susie E. Goodson Professor of Mechanical Engineering, discuss the microchannel data at the Ray W. Herrick Laboratories. (Purdue News Service photo/David Umberger)

Unlike conventional cooling systems, which use a fan to circulate air through finned devices called heat sinks attached to computer chips, miniature refrigeration would dramatically increase how much heat could be removed, said Suresh Garimella, the R. Eugene and Susie E. Goodson Professor of Mechanical Engineering.

The Purdue research focuses on learning how to design miniature components called compressors and evaporators, which are critical for refrigeration systems. The researchers developed an analytical model for designing tiny compressors that pump refrigerants using penny-size diaphragms and validated the model with experimental data. The elastic membranes are made of ultra-thin sheets of a plastic called polyimide and coated with an electrically conducting metallic layer. The metal layer allows the diaphragm to be moved back and forth to produce a pumping action using electrical charges, or “electrostatic diaphragm compression.”

In related research, the engineers are among the first to precisely measure how a refrigerant boils and vaporizes inside tiny “microchannels” in an evaporator and determine how to vary this boiling rate for maximum chip cooling.

The research is led by Garimella and Eckhard Groll, a professor of mechanical engineering.

“We feel we have a very good handle on this technology now, but there still are difficulties in implementing it in practical applications,” said Garimella, director of the Cooling Technologies Research Center based at Purdue. “One challenge is that it’s difficult to make a compressor really small that runs efficiently and reliably.”

Findings will be detailed in two papers being presented during the 12th International Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Conference and the 19th International Compressor Engineering Conference on July 14-17 at Purdue. The papers were written by doctoral students Stefan S. Bertsch and Abhijit A. Sathe, Groll and Garimella.

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Green supercomputer powers up at Purdue

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Traditional supercomputers are like huge diesel trucks: They are powerful and can carry a big load.

But a new type of supercomputer installed this week at Purdue University, built by SiCortex, is like employing a fleet of thousands of bike messengers: Individually they don’t carry much freight, but they use less energy and are more effective in some situations.

Energy-efficient computing is becoming essential for science, says Purdue University’s Gerry McCartney, vice president for information technology and chief information officer, shown here standing in front of a SiCortex supercomputer that uses less power than traditional machines. McCartney says the energy costs of supercomputers is constraining science in some areas, prompting a need for new technologies. (Purdue News Service photo by David Umberger.)

The supercomputer is the first of what is expected to be many new technologies used at Purdue and elsewhere to lower the energy demands of scientific research.

Gerry McCartney, vice president for information technology and chief information officer at Purdue, says the supercomputer, a SiCortex 5832, uses 40 times less power than traditional supercomputers.

“The net energy savings is significant. We expect to see a reduction of 75 percent to 80 percent of the costs of the energy and the associated costs of the cooling in using this machine,” McCartney says. “But this is an experimental machine in the sense that we are just learning how to use it to make real scientific discoveries.”

SiCortex, based in Boston, is a new computing company that produces systems designed specifically for high performance computing used in research supercomputers. Argonne National Laboratory also has installed one of the energy efficient machines.

“Energy use has become one of the biggest challenges in conducting scientific research,” McCartney says. “It’s not just the power the computer itself uses, which can be significant, but also the air conditioning. Supercomputers are the prima donnas of the computing world. They’re like a star insisting on a special dressing room. These machines require special facilities called data centers where we pump in massive amounts of extra air conditioning or they literally self-destruct.

“The electricity needs of the supercomputers and the associated cooling can sometimes limit the amount of science that can be done.”

A recent research paper from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory said that for a climate model to look at what is happening down to scales of one kilometer would require a supercomputer that would use 200 megawatts of power. That is the same amount of electricity used by a city with a population of 100,000.

“The energy issue is something we are going to have to solve in order to make significant scientific advances,” McCartney says.

The SiCortex 5832 is about the size of two refrigerators, and it has with DeLorean-style gull-wing doors, which gives it a “Back to the Future” vibe (although it is missing a flux capacitor).

Its processors draw just 600 milliwatts of power each, or about the same power requirements as a cell phone or small flashlight. By comparison, a standard supercomputer contains thousands of processors that require about 25 watts (25,000 milliwatts) of energy each.

The SiCortex computer uses a non-traditional architecture to achieve the power savings, and eliminates parts of the processor that aren’t needed for supercomputers that would otherwise expend energy. Also, because of the technology used, it is cheaper to buy than comparable supercomputers.

“With these advantages one might ask, ‘Why don’t you replace all of your supercomputers with this machine?’” McCartney says. “The reason is that this type of computer architecture works better for some kinds of science than others, and part of why we’re acquiring the SiCortex is so we can learn how to do more science with this type of computer.”

Research scientists in Purdue’s Office of Information Technology will explore what kind of computational tasks can work on the new class of machines and possibly even rewrite software so they can run common science applications.

Rudolf Eigenmann, professor of electrical and computer engineering and interim director of Purdue’s Computing Research Institute, says faculty researchers are already using the new machine.

“There are science applications that are already well adapted to this type of computing, such as research in chemistry and genetics, and even nano-electronics,” Eigenmann says. “We’ve put this computer to use from the first day, but we will also be looking for more areas in which we can use lower-power computing.”

Purdue scientists will be exploring new ways to conduct research so this type of computer machine can begin to replace other supercomputers on campus.

“At Purdue we have a team of talented research scientists in our central computing division who focus on improving scientific computing, so it makes sense for us to be among the first to look at this new technology to see how it can be used for discovery,” McCartney says.

Purdue supercomputer unboxed and built by lunchtime

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Staff members at Purdue University had hoped to build the Big Ten’s largest campus supercomputer in just a day on Monday, May 5.

But it didn’t take that long — they were done by lunch.

Purdue computer technicians put the finishing touches on Steele, a new supercomputer that is among the largest in the world. Staff members at the university were challenged to build the supercomputer in a day, but finished the job by lunchtime. (Purdue News Service photo/David Umberger)

“The assembly was finished much faster than we expected, and by noon we were doing science,” says Gerry McCartney, vice president for information technology and chief information officer. “The staff was enthusiastic, the weather was great, and there were no problems installing the hardware or software. There is no cloud to accompany this silver lining.”

By 1 p.m. more than 500 of the 812 nodes that make up the supercomputer were already running 1,400 research jobs from across campus.

The supercomputer, which is named “Steele” for John Steele, former staff and faculty member, is made up of 812 Dell servers and is capable of performing 60 trillion operations per second. The supercomputer would rank in the top 40 of the current ranking of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, and is the largest supercomputer on a Big Ten campus that is not a part of a national center.

A time-lapse video of the supercomputer construction is available via YouTube: Supercomputer assembly at Purdue University

The first shift of workers was scheduled to begin unpacking boxes at 7 a.m., but many employees arrived at 6 a.m., eager to begin working. By 11 a.m. the supercomputer was essentially complete except for a few nodes that were intentionally held back to be installed at the noon dedication.

“We discovered that a build like this leverages the commodity nature of cluster computing, by using standard computing parts,” McCartney said. “By using commodity computer servers to build our supercomputer, we didn’t have to fly in engineers or hire specialized technicians. We were able to do it with our own IT staff in about four hours.”

Indiana University, Purdue’s rival on the athletic fields, surprised the Purdue IT staff by sending a crew of technicians to help build the machine.

Matt Link, director of research technology systems at IU, says he was pleased to be a part of the event.

“We often collaborate with people from Purdue on research proposals by videoconferencing, but we don’t routinely get the opportunity to work together in person,” Link said. “Our meeting today was enjoyable and will serve to strengthen future collaborations between IU and Purdue.”

The supercomputer was funded by Purdue faculty members who contributed research funds instead of purchasing equipment for their own laboratories.

Ashlie Martini, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and one of the faculty who helped fund the project, will use the computer’s power to study friction at the molecular level. She watched the technicians install the nodes in the data center.

“The great thing about this approach is that almost everything was done for us,” Martini said. “This was very efficient. I have nothing but good things to say about today.”

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