From an easy way to do cutting-edge science in a Web-based environment today to getting ready to take advantage of tomorrow’s next-generation high performance computers, presentations given by Purdue researchers at the SuperComputing ’08 (SC08) conference covered a variety of topics in the field.

The presentations were part of the activity in Purdue’s booth at SC08 where visitors also got a chance to build and manage their own supercomputer — virtually anyway. The SC Conference is the premier international gathering for high-performance computing, networking, storage and analysis.

The booth at the world’s largest high-performance computing conference was designed to promote Purdue, ITaP — the University’s central information technology organization — and the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing, ITaP’s research-computing arm. The conference took place Nov. 15-21 in Austin, Texas.

The theme of the Purdue booth this year was: “No cycle left behind, no byte left unexplored.” That relates to the creative ways ITaP is finding to improve scientific productivity, said John Campbell, associate vice president for information technology, who heads the Rosen Center. For example, Purdue’s Condor pool — a high-throughput distributed computing system that makes use of otherwise idle machines in offices, labs and elsewhere for research purposes and is more than 20,000 processors strong — was highlighted in a colorful animated short film at the conference.

“We demonstrated a series of projects that we have implemented or expanded over the past year,” Campbell said.

Among other things, Purdue’s booth also provided information to potential Purdue students and to job seekers about University academic programs and positions with ITaP and the Rosen Center.

The booth also attracted some computer game fans as well. The Purdue-designed Rack-A-Node is a “tower-defense” strategy game that has players build and operate a simulated supercomputer to manage waves of science jobs in fields ranging from climate-modeling and physics to chemistry and pharmacy, said Kyle Bowen, manager of ITaP’s informatics team, which created the game.

SC08 visitors gave a console version of Rack-A-Node, which also is available on the Web, a spin at Purdue’s booth. Players start with a small computer and have to manage a series of jobs successfully to earn funding to buy an even larger machine and advance to subsequent levels of the game.

Purdue’s booth featured two presentations on the HUBzero technology developed at the University, which makes it easy for researchers to create “electronic virtual organizations” for connecting with colleagues throughout the world and sharing ideas, computational resources and data. The technology also makes it possible to deliver in integrated fashion simulation tools, tutorials and workshops, podcasts and other resources via the Web — all in an manner so elegant, you have to see it to believe it, said Michael McLennan, senior research scientist and hub technology architect at Purdue and the Rosen Center.

Purdue has become a recognized leader in such “cyberinfrastructure” with the development of HUBzero, which powers nanoHUB.org and many other web-based “hubs” for scientific collaboration.

At SC08, McLennan gave presentations on the HUBzero platform while Purdue electrical and computer engineering Professor Gerhard Klimeck spoke about nanoHUB, an international resource for nanotechnology theory, simulation and education that now has tens of thousands of users. NanoHUB is built on HUBzero.

Purdue presentations also focused on taking advantage of the myriad processors available in high-performance computing systems today and set to burgeon with the advent of petascale computers capable of more than a thousand trillion calculations per second.

• Purdue Professor Alex Pothen, head of Purdue’s Computing Research Institute, outlined recent results from the Combinatorial Scientific Computing & Petascale Simulations (CSCAPES) Institute.

• Faisal Saied, a senior research scientist at the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing and the Computing Research Institute, discussed work toward petascale simulation at the Purdue Center for Prediction of Reliability, Integrity and Survivability of Microsystems (PRISM).

• Rudolf Eigenmann, professor of electrical and computer engineering and technical director of the Computing Research Institute, covered methods for compiling programs to take advantage of today’s nearly ubiquitous multiprocessor systems (even laptops) and other high-performance computing platforms.

• Other planned presentations covered topics such as moving high-resolution scientific visualizations quickly over long-distance networks; using the Condor system to tap and combine unused compute cycles on server, office and lab machines for high-throughput high performance computing; accelerating applications with field programmable gate arrays — essentially chips that can be programmed to do specific tasks really well — and more.

Writer: Greg Kline, science and technology writer, ITaP, (765) 494-8167, gkline@purdue.edu

Last updated: Nov. 11, 2008

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