WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Facebook for scientists — but built to facilitate serious research rather than socializing — and an award-winning method for putting idle computers to work on scientific breakthroughs are Purdue-developed technologies in the spotlight at the SC09, the world’s largest high-performance computing conference.

Purdue is highlighting the HUBzero and DiaGrid technologies at the university’s booth at SC09, which opens today (Monday, Nov. 16) in Portland, Ore.

HUBzero is a soon-to-be open source software platform developed by Purdue for deploying and applying computational research tools, visualizing and analyzing results interactively and publishing them, all through a familiar Web browser. Built-in social networking features akin to Facebook create communities of researchers and educators in science, engineering, medicine and almost any field or subject matter.

DiaGrid works by pooling computers over the Purdue campus network and off campus via the Internet and fast research networks. Whenever machines in the pool are idle, such as at night or when their owners are at lunch, the system sends work to them. Campus Technology Magazine selected DiaGrid for a 2009 international Campus Technology Innovators Award.

Purdue has created an automated system to link the computers of SC09 participants to the pool during the conference. The Purdue booth includes a scoreboard to keep track of whose machines are running the most jobs.

The booth is designed to promote Purdue; Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP), the university’s central information technology organization; and the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing, ITaP’s research and discovery arm. ITaP technologists developed HUBzero and DiaGrid.

“DiaGrid and HUBzero are model technologies for enabling research that Purdue is making available to the world,” says John Campbell, associate vice president in charge of research computing for ITaP, who heads the Rosen Center. “As the premier conference for research computing, SC09 is a prime place to showcase these technologies.”

Purdue’s booth also will provide academic information to potential Purdue students and information to job seekers about positions with Purdue, ITaP and the Rosen Center. Nearly 10,000 people attended the conference in 2008.

Purdue has become a recognized leader in cyberinfrastructure with the development of HUBzero, which powers nanoHUB.org and many other Web-based “hubs” for research collaboration, says Michael McLennan, senior research scientist and hub technology architect at Purdue. NanoHUB is an international resource for nanotechnology theory, simulation and education with tens of thousands of users.

“Like no other platform, HUBzero can host interactive simulation tools. So, users aren’t just reading about research, they can experience it,” McLennan says. “HUBzero allows users to work together as they interact with content.”

Other hubs link researchers transforming laboratory discoveries into new medical treatments, and Purdue is now working in a consortium with Indiana and Clemson universities and the University of Wisconsin to advance the technology even further.

A hub will be at the center of the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES), a $105 Million National Science Foundation program announced in September, which is led by Purdue. Purdue electrical and computer engineering Professor Rudolf Eigenmann, co-principal investigator of NEES, will give a workshop titled “Cyberinfrastructure for Earthquake Engineering” at the Purdue booth.

McLennan will host two workshops on HUBzero and one about nanoHUB during the conference. Purdue scientist Mathieu Luisier will offer a workshop on using massive supercomputers to simulate nanoscale electronic devices for the next generation of electronics, a central focus of nanoHUB.

DiaGrid includes computers in student computer labs, offices, server rooms and supercomputing clusters and is the first multi-campus collaboration of its kind. Purdue’s partners in DiaGrid are IU, Indiana State University, the universities of Notre Dame, Louisville and Wisconsin, Purdue’s Calumet and North Central campuses, and Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne.

Together, they now make nearly 30,000 processors available for research jobs ranging from understanding the Solar System’s formation to imaging the structure of viruses at near-atomic resolutions in an effort to develop new ways of battling viral illnesses, from swine flu and the common cold to West Nile virus and AIDS.

“The sheer size and ingenuity of the initiative, as well as the diversity of computing resources represented in the grid, really set the project apart,” Geoffrey Fletcher, editorial director of Campus Technology, said in announcing the Campus Technology Innovators Award for DiaGrid.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Advancing research and education to reduce the devastation and loss of human life from earthquakes and tsunamis is the goal of a new center at Purdue University.

The National Science Foundation awarded $105 million to a Purdue-led team to spearhead a center that will serve as headquarters for the operations of the George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation, or NEES. Submitted through the Cyber Center in Purdue’s Discovery Park, the grant spans five years and is the largest in the university’s history.

Purdue will connect 14 NEES research equipment sites and the earthquake engineering community through groundbreaking cyberinfrastructure, education and outreach efforts. Purdue’s center is expected to begin operations on Oct. 1, and will be housed in the university’s Discovery Learning Research Center in Discovery Park.

“I was delighted to learn that Purdue has the opportunity to lead this consortium of first-rate research universities,” said Purdue President France A. Córdova, who serves on the National Science Board, the governing board for the NSF, but was excused from deliberations on the award. “I’ve seen firsthand how devastating an earthquake can be not only to buildings, highways and the infrastructure of a city, but also to families, the community and people’s sense of security.

“Purdue’s depth of knowledge in earthquake engineering, innovative high-performance computing experts, education professionals and outstanding interdisciplinary research abilities allow the university to make great contributions to this area. The universities and institutions participating have had great individual successes, and we hope to bring them together to create a whole that is even greater than the sum of its parts.”

In the past decade, 124 major earthquakes have occurred throughout the world, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Major earthquakes are generally accepted to register a magnitude in excess of 7 on the Richter scale and inflict serious damage, including the collapse of buildings and bridges, over a large area.

The organization estimates that earthquakes were responsible for 463,959 deaths in the past decade.

The Purdue-led NEEScomm Center, which stands for NEES Community and Communications, includes partners from the University of Washington at Seattle, University of Texas at Austin, University of Kansas at Lawrence, San Jose State University, the University of Florida at Gainsville, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

The center will help researchers share information and equipment to enable research and innovation in earthquake and tsunami loss reduction, create an educated work force in hazard mitigation, and conduct broader outreach and lifelong learning activities, said Julio Ramirez, the project’s principal investigator and a professor of civil engineering.

“Recent events have highlighted the importance of earthquake engineering for the United States and the world,” said Ramirez, who also will serve as the center’s director. “In China last year, tens of thousands of people perished as entire cities came down. The earthquake caused a tremendous financial burden in terms of rebuilding the civil infrastructure, but more than that, a high percentage of those who died were children – the future of a nation.”

Building codes and earthquake preparedness have improved in recent years, but even cities that lead in incorporating the latest safety features are at risk for serious damage, he said.

“Even in Los Angeles, a relatively young city in the global perspective, the building inventory includes structures that were built before buildings were engineered to mitigate earthquake hazard,” Ramirez said. “Earthquake design provisions have changed rapidly and substantially since 1980.”

Older cities and those in developing countries are likely to have the most buildings vulnerable to earthquakes and face the highest risk for damage and loss of lives, he said.

Forbes magazine cited a 2001 study by GeoHazards International that estimated the number of lives that would be lost if different cities experienced a magnitude 6 or higher earthquake. The study evaluated cities in Asia and the Americas. Kathmandu, Nepal, topped the list, followed by Istanbul, Turkey; Delhi, India; Quito, Ecuador; Manila, Philippines; and Islambad, Pakistan. All of the cities were estimated to face tens of thousands of fatalities if an earthquake struck.

The Purdue-based center will lead, manage, operate and maintain NEES. Through the NEES network, researchers from the United States and abroad conduct experiments and simulations of the ways buildings, bridges, utility systems and different materials perform during seismic events. Earthquake engineers will use this information to develop better and more cost-effective ways of reducing earthquake damage through improved materials, construction techniques and monitoring tools, Ramirez said.

The center’s education, outreach and training initiatives will use engineering education research to construct next-generation learning experiences that can be disseminated globally, he said. A team of engineering educators and technology specialists will develop the NEES Academy, a state-of-the-art virtual institution for cyber-enabled learning. The academy will help preK-12 teachers develop student interest in, and awareness of, science, mathematics, engineering and technology and will support undergraduate and graduate students engaging in research.

“The center will bring world-class education to any place in the world that has access to broadband Internet,” Ramirez said. “It will enable colleges and universities that don’t have the educational resources of Purdue to access the facilities, equipment, simulations and teaching tools of the participating institutions.”

Joy M. Pauschke, NEES program director at the National Science Foundation, said NEES is an integral part of the U.S. National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program to support basic research to discover new knowledge, innovation and technologies for earthquake and tsunami loss reduction for the nation.

“During the first five years of operations, the unique NEES experimental capabilities and the extraordinarily strong user support from facility staff have enabled landmark testing and comprehensive experimental data capture for modeling seismic performance that was not possible before NEES,” Pauschke said. “Through Purdue’s leadership, the NEES experimental facilities, NEEShub and NEES Academy will provide world-class resources for earthquake engineering researchers, educators, students and practitioners not only in the United States, but globally.”

A cornerstone of the center is the development of information technology components that allow for new forms of collaboration and cooperation, said Rudolf Eigenmann, co-principal investigator and professor of electrical and computer engineering.

The NEEScomm Center will be a collaborative space and science hub where scientists and engineers can run scientific models and “what if?” scenarios. Hubs, which were first developed at Purdue, allow researchers to run models using a simple Web interface. The hub connects with supercomputing resources on the NSF’s TeraGrid and the national DiaGrid, which allow researchers to run their experiments without having to request time on a supercomputer.

“A critical and often difficult component of sharing data to advance research is making the findings of others easy to access and use,” Eigenmann said. “The HUBzero technology will allow for someone to simply go to a Web site and instantly be able to view data or run a simulation. It will eliminate the need to first download and install an application to view the data and then spend time downloading a large volume of data before beginning work.”

The cyberinfrastructure to be deployed by the NEEScomm Center is powered using HUBzero technology, which was originally created by researchers at Purdue University to support nanoHUB.org, a site for researchers studying nanotechnology. Currently there are nine other hubs online in science, engineering and medicine, and 12 more are expected to be online within a year, including the new NEEShub.

Ellen Rathje, professor of geotechnical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin and co-principal investigator of the project, said another key advantage of NEEShub is its data presentation capabilities.

“The new information technology created will enable research to take place that couldn’t be done before,” Rathje said. “Data will be presented in an easily searchable and usable format, like a virtual lab notebook, that will give experiments a longer life as researchers reuse existing data to run their own analysis and find new insights. It’s sort of like Facebook for scientists, but instead of posting vacation photos we’re posting research results.”

In addition to Ramirez and Eigenmann, Purdue University project co-principal investigators include Thomas Hacker, assistant professor of computer and information technology; Sean Brophy, assistant professor of engineering education; and Saurabh Bagchi, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering.

In addition, assistant professors of civil engineering Santiago Pujol and Ayhan Irfanoglu provide the team with earthquake engineering expertise in information technology matters of tele-operation and data management.

Project co-principal investigator Barbara Fossum, former managing director of Purdue’s Cyber Center, will serve as the center’s deputy director, and Dawn Weisman, former managing director of Purdue’s PRISM: National Nuclear Security Administration Center for Prediction of Reliability, Integrity and Survivability of Microsystems, will serve as information technology director.

Co-principal investigators Brophy and Thalia Anagnos from San Jose State University will co-lead the center’s education, outreach and training initiatives.

Fossum said the center will manage the operations of the network and engage the equipment sites to effectively carry out program initiatives.

“The United States has invested close to $300 million to commission and enable the equipment sites, and there are over 100 projects currently under way,” she said. “It is a resource for the nation and we want to help realize its full potential by sharing the unique resources and programs at each site across the network and with those interested in mitigating earthquake hazards throughout the world.”

The center will create more than 20 full-time positions and five graduate student positions at Purdue for Web application developers, software engineers, and research scientists and engineers.

The NEES equipment sites include Oregon State University; University of Nevada, Reno; University of California, Davis; University of California, Berkeley; University of California, Santa Barbara; University of California at Los Angeles; University of California at San Diego; University of Texas, Austin; University of Minnesota; University of Illinois, Urbana; University at Buffalo-SUNY; Cornell University; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; and Lehigh University.

NEES began development in 2000 and is a shared national network of 14 state-of-the-art earthquake engineering and tsunami experimental facilities at universities across the United States. It includes collaborative tools, a centralized data repository and earthquake simulation software.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Purdue is acting as if building world-class supercomputers is the newest college sport.

For the second year in a row, Purdue will build what is expected to be the Big Ten’s largest campus computer, and as before, it will be running jobs by the end of the day.

“Last year we unboxed the components for our Steele supercomputer in the morning and we were doing science in the afternoon,” says Gerry McCartney, chief information officer and vice president for information technology. “We expect to do the same thing with Coates, even though it is significantly larger.”

“Coates,” the new supercomputer, will be built from more than 10,000 computer cores, or processors, versus Steele’s 6,500 cores.

Coates is also expected to be the first internationally ranked academic supercomputer that is wired solely by superfast ten-gigabit network connections—allowing it to more easily handle the large amounts of data produced by research areas such as climate modeling and weather forecasting.

“Building supercomputers and other infrastructure needed for science and engineering is business as usual at Purdue,” McCartney says. “We have developed both a business model and an operational method that allows us to build world-class computers to meet the increasing demand from our researchers.”

On July 21, more than 200 information technology staff from Purdue will gather to construct the room-sized machine. They are expected to be joined by colleagues from the universities of Michigan and Iowa, as well Michigan State University and cross-state rival Indiana University, who will be observing and participating in the construction.

To generate excitement on Purdue’s campus and elsewhere, the IT staff created a parody movie trailer, “Cores,” which is a take off on the Pixar movie hit “Cars.” The video can be seen below.

Coates is expected to rank in the top 50 supercomputers worldwide when the next ranking is published in November. Supercomputers are ranked according to an agreed-upon benchmarking system, and the list is published twice a year at http://www.top500.org

The Big Ten’s largest campus computer is currently at the University of Minnesota’s Supercomputing Institute, which was ranked 59th in the June 2009 list, eclipsing Steele, which topped the list in its first benchmarking for the November 2008 Top 500 list. In that ranking, Purdue’s Steele was the Big Ten’s largest computer, ranked 105th in the world.

Supercomputing technology progresses rapidly, however, and six months later, in the June 2009 Top 500 list, Steele has moved from 105th to 196th.

“Even with Purdue’s international reputation as a leader in high performance computing, Coates isn’t being built for bragging rights,” McCartney says. “Top scientists and engineers require world-class resources in order to do their research, and with Coates we have a computer that is both powerful and capable of crunching massive data sets.”

Coates will be built with 1,280 HP dual quad-core computer nodes using AMD processors, and Cisco and Chelsio network equipment. It is expected to have a peak performance of 90 teraflops.

“Purdue University has deployed one of the world’s largest 10 GbE low latency, high performance computing infrastructures for scientific research, and we are honored that this strategic thought leader chose Cisco Nexus data center switches for a research facility of this magnitude,” said Soni Jiandani, vice president of marketing for Cisco’s Server Access and Virtualization Group. “Cisco is pleased to partner with Purdue to efficiently use computing resources and enable researchers to push the boundaries of science.“

Coates, like Steele, is being built as a “community cluster,” in which faculty on campus contributed research funds to fund the purchase, says John Campbell, associate vice president for Rosen Center for Advanced Computing at Purdue.

“Besides the cost savings from making a group purchase, the faculty can borrow computing cycles from other faculty when the other clusters are idle,” Campbell says. “This gives the researchers more flexibility, and we also have unused computing cycles we can offer to the National Science Foundation’s TeraGrid.”

The new cluster is being named for Clarence L. “Ben” Coates, head of Purdue’s School of Electrical Engineering (now Electrical and Computer Engineering) from 1973 to 1983. Coates retired in 1988 and died in 2000 at age 76. Coates was a driving force behind high performance computing at Purdue.

“Naming our research clusters after former Purdue IT leaders gives us a way to recognize the contributions of these great people,” McCartney says.

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.

“There’s a group of people who are into both science and computing,” says Kyle Bowen, informatics manager for Information Technology at Purdue. “The characters on the television show ‘Big Bang Theory’ would spend hours playing Rack-A-Node.”

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.

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/