Of interest: NCSA UNVEILS ROADRUNNER LINUX-BASED WORKSTATIONSUPERCLUSTER (fwd)

["Richard H. Fifarek" <rfifarek@som.siu.edu>]

NCSA UNVEILS ROADRUNNER LINUX-BASED WORKSTATION SUPERCLUSTER       04.02.99
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  Albuquerque, NM -- The National Computational Science Alliance will
introduce its first 128 processor workstation supercluster running the Linux
operating system as the latest addition to the National Technology Grid, its
arsenal of powerful computational resources. The supercluster, called
Roadrunner, will be unveiled at an April 8 dedication of the Supercluster
Computing Facility of the Albuquerque High Performance Computing Center
(AHPCC), located on the University of New Mexico (UNM) campus.

  "Scalable clusters represent the most rapidly growing architecture of
high-end computing," said Larry Smarr, director of the Alliance and the
National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), located at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "By filling the gap between
desktop workstations and teraflop-scale supercomputing systems, clusters
provide a very cost-effective source of computing power close to the user."

  The emerging National Technology Grid connects a broad range of parallel
computing systems, located at facilities from Boston to Maui, into a single
virtual machine room. Based on the latest off-the-shelf technology,
Roadrunner is the first large Linux-based workstation cluster to be added to
the Grid. Roadrunner will provide the scientific community with a shared,
cost-effective production environment for solving computational tasks too
large for individual workstations. Roadrunner is designed to support
traditional high-performance computing applications and emerging national
information infrastructure applications, such as scalable Web serving,
interactive visualization and data exploration, information serving, and
data mining.

  "Superclusters and supercomputers have made UNM a national leader in this
strategic area," said William Gordon, president of UNM. "We now have two
supernodes on the National Technology Grid -- the Roadrunner cluster at
AHPCC and our nationally recognized supercomputing resources at the Maui
High Performance Computing Center (MHPCC). UNM stands committed to continued
collaborations with the Alliance, Sandia National Laboratory, Los Alamos
National Laboratory, and the Department of Defense to deliver
production-level, scalable computing resources to the scientific community."

  Roadrunner is a 64-node AltaCluster by Alta Technology Corporation
containing 128 Intel 450 MHz Pentium II processors. The supercluster runs
the Linux operating system and the processors are interconnected via a
Myrinet network for high-speed communications. The supercluster will also be
used for computer science projects that compare software performance with
other Alliance machines, such as the Windows NT Supercluster and the Silicon
Graphics Origin2000 array at NCSA and the IBM RS/6000 SP at MHPCC. UNM, the
Alliance, Alta Technology and Intel are working together and with others in
the industry to further evolve Linux-based cluster technology. Plans are to
grow the Roadrunner Supercluster to 512 processors over the next 12 months,
subject to the availability of necessary resources.

  Anand Chandrasekhar, general manager of the Workstation Products Group at
Intel stated: "We are excited  to see  Intel Architecture based workstation
technology as the foundation for the Alliance's National Linux Supercluster
being deployed at UNM. Intel is focused on driving the performance available
with Intel-based workstations, which is resulting in rapid adoption of our
systems in commercial markets and increasingly, for the highest-end
technical and research applications."

  "We're pleased to see an AltaCluster being placed into production for
general scientific computing," said Glen Lowry, president and CEO of Alta
Technology Corporation. "Linux-based AltaClusters have been used in many
scientific and research environments in the past -- this production cluster
represents a great continuation of UNM's computation offering."

  The National Computational Science Alliance is a partnership to prototype
an advanced computational infrastructure for the 21st century and includes
more than 50 academic, government and industry research partners from across
the United States. The Alliance is one of two partnerships funded by the
National Science Foundation's Partnerships for Advanced Computational
Infrastructure (PACI) program and receives cost-sharing at partner
institutions. NSF also supports the National Partnership for Advanced
Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), led by the San Diego Supercomputer
Center.

  The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is the leading-edge
site for the National Computational Science Alliance. NCSA is a leader in
the development and deployment of cutting-edge high-performance computing,
networking and information technologies. The National Science Foundation,
the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, industrial partners, and
other federal agencies fund NCSA.


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