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Supercomputing
Made Possible on Campus
By
Peter Mok
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In
the past, the issue of setting up a supercomputing facility in
the University was raised a few times but turned down due to a
number of reasons. First of all, supercomputing is only required
for large scale and number crunching applications which are, if
any, rare in the University. It is therefore not viable to purchase
an extremely expensive supercomputer especially when it is only
to be used for a few projects. Secondly, there is the possibility
of using the supercomputers in other universities in Hong Kong
or overseas. However, this has proved to be impractical from past
experiences.
Although the
reasons were sound, the lack of such a facility does hinder CityU's
ability to undertake research work that requires enormous computing
power. With this in mind, the Computing Services Centre (CSC)
continues to seek alternative solutions regardless of the opposition.
After months and months of persistent negotiations and hard work,
the CSC had finally made a breakthrough. Taking the opportunity
of the regular upgrade exercise of central computing facility,
as well as a joint venture with Sun Microsystems, a third Sun
Ultra Enterprise 10000 Server has been installed in March for
academic and research uses. This new E10000 with 24 top-of-the-line
400 MHz UltraSparc CPUs is a machine of supercomputer class with
a total processing power of 19.2 Gflops equal to the horsepower
of the two existing E10000 servers combined. Besides high performance
CPUs, the new system also includes 6 GB memory and 460 GB disk
storage. Available software includes HPC cluster tools, HPC Load
Sharing Facility software as well as Sun-Netscape Alliance software
products.
With the establishment
of the new machine, the benefits are two-fold. On the one hand,
it can offload the research work and some teaching activities
from the existing machine in order to make room for the envisaged
growth in the near future. On the other hand, the new system can
be configured dynamically to become a dedicated supercomputer
when and as needed. The latter thus meets the requirements of
large-scaled research projects without involving a huge sum of
investment from the University.
As the new
system is already in place, it is time to think seriously about
possible research projects that can best utilise the new system
of supercomputer class. In the meantime, it is planned that the
academic & research accounts on the existing Unix machine
as well as the required application software will be migrated
to this new machine soon. Please watch out for the migration schedule
which will be announced shortly. The whole migration process is
expected to be completed in the Summer Semester.
