CISL Annual Report 2005 > CISL research accomplishments

Computational science research accomplishments

The computer science group is responsible for tracking, evaluating, and early adoption of technology and for performing basic research in the following areas:

1. High-end computing
2. Grid Computing
3. Linux cluster development
4. Experimental networking and evaluation of high-performance interconnects
5. System and network performance analysis
6. High-performance file systems and archival storage systems

In the past year we have:

• Worked with SSG to deploy, maintain, and administer frost, a one rack (2048 processor) IBM Blue Gene system.

• Helped NCAR and university researchers port their codes to frost. In the case of HOMME we were able to scale it up to 32,768 processors on a larger Blue Gene system at IBM's Rochester facility.

Sustained MFLOP per second per processor for moist Held-Suarez simulation using HOMME. Explicit integration with Dt=4 seconds. 6 X 128 X 128 elements, 96 vertical levels. Seventh-order spectral elements.

• Worked with CU researchers to build a 56 processor IBM Power PC based blade cluster and a two node storage cluster. The latter was used to build several filesystems (e.g., GPFS, PVFS2, Lustre) and determine their suitability for operating in a heterogeneous Linux cluster environment.

• Investigated 10G interconnect technology from Myricom and RDMA over Ethernet interconnect technology from Ammasso.

• Assisted CU researchers to deploy a 10 Gb/s experimental network testbed between NOAA and CU.