An advisory committee has been appointed for governance of use. [Yay.]

Computational Science and Engineering Institute[?]

• to build a world class facility
• to provide high performance network to tie in with computational grids
• connect supercomputers, visualizations, and data storage

• support research in computational science and engineering
• dual usage: production & experimental (apps)
• create beneficial collaboration [scribble scribble, I need to write things I can read]

• based on 64 bit architechture
• employs high bandwidth low latency communications fabric
• operational for production [apps?] in Fall 2003; fully operational by the end of the year

• cost vs. performance (purely)
• total cost $5.2 million includes system itself, memory, storage, and communication fabrics
• one of the cheapest systems of its kind

• Dell - too expensive [one of the reasons for the project being so "hush hush" was that dell was exploring pricing options during bidding]
• Sun (sparc) - required too many processors, also too expensive
• IBM/AMD (opteron) - required twice the number of processors and was twice the price in the desired configuration; had no chassis available
• HP (itanium) - ditto
• Apple (IBM PPC970) - system available with chassis for lowest price

• dual PPC970 2GHz
• Each node has:
• 4 GB RAM
• 160 GB serial ATA
• 176 TB total secondary storage
• 4 head nodes
• 1 management node
• most powerful "homebuilt" supercomputer in the world

• commodity clusters have issues due to the large number of units
• VT developed transparent fault tolerance system called "Deja Vu"
• collaborated with PSC
• can recover from just about every failure, i.e. someone hits the wrong switch, OS crashes, things fail in general, power loss, etc
• This system has been ported to the G5 and will be deployed in the TCF

• working with Mellanox for infiniband solutions
• the system is [obviously] based on infiniband technology
• full switch network 20 Gbps, full duplex
• 24 96 port switches in "fat-tree topology"

• Gigabit fast ethernet management backplane

• all networking equipment [at least for this locale] is CISCO
• the following organizations are involved with NLR:
• CENIC
• CISCO
• Duke
• Florida Consortium
• Georgia Tech
• Internet2
• MATP
• PNWGP [pacific northwest group]
• Texas [I imagine a university, not the whole state. "Yes, Texas backs National Lambda Rail, yessir."]
• additional player: PSC [yeah I don't know either]
• VT leads Washington DC point of presence
• DC node goes active in the first half of 2004

• Mac OSX
• Why not linux? Not enough support.
• Mellanox does Inifiniband drivers and HCA
• MPI (parallel communications libraries)
• Argonne National labs to get MPI-2 for the system
• C, C++ compilers - IBM xlc and gcc 3.3
• Fortran 95/90/77 Compilers - IBM xlf and NAGWare

Organizations that could make use of the facility or have already expressed interest:

• Federal organizations
• NSF, CyberinfrastructureProgram
• NIH, DOE, DARPA, DoD, AFOSR[??], ONR [?????]
• Industry (the system can attract industrial interest)
• External Research Partners
• National Labs, Supercomputer Centers, NASA, NIA

• internal access not based soley on research funding contributed
• priorities might be established based on contribution at a later time
• provide easy access for investigators [I missed the end of this line]
• external access determined on a cost recovery basis

• Computational Science and Engineering is a long-term project
• Current facility will be followed with a second in 2006

• Oct. 1st - preliminary operations
• Oct. 1st - Mid Nov. - performance optimization and benchmarking
• Mid Nov. - available for initial apps ("hero-users" [heh, i.e. the poor suckers who test out the initiall config])
• available to any user with operating MPI coverage [huh?]
• Jan 2004 - fully operational