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UB TO INSTALL $7 MILLION SUPERCOMPUTER RESEARCH CENTER
Published on January 15, 1999
Author: FRED O. WILLIAMS
© The Buffalo News Inc.
The University at Buffalo today announced creation of a $7 million supercomputer research center, a move designed to propel it into the nation's top 10 computer research sites.
The supercomputer will allow UB to tackle computation-intensive problems such as designing new molecules and modeling global climate change, researchers said. The Center for Computational Research will "catapult UB into the ranks of the nation's top academic supercomputing sites," university President William R. Greiner said. Greiner announced the center at a news conference today on the North Campus in Amherst. The center, being built in a former cafeteria, is expected to be complete in May. The IBM Corp. computer -- an advanced version of the "Deep Blue" machine that vanquished chess champion Garry Kasparov -- also will be available to area companies for technology research, boosting regional economic development. "There are certainly a lot of companies that could benefit. . . (by) having access to one of these machines," said Russ Miller, director of the center and UB professor of computer science and engineering. Praxair, Calspan and Occidental Chemical are among the companies that have already expressed interest in using the supercomputer, university officials said. Companies might pay for access directly or fund joint research programs. Within the university and outside it, the supercomputer will open up an entire field of computation-based science, or "deep computing," that's built on number-crunching power, mIller said. Using computer modeling techniques, researchers can design molecules for pharmaceutical use, simulate the performance of automobile and aerospace equipment, and predict -- or at least try to understand -- climate changes such as global warming. Although primarily aimed at academic topics, the supercomputer can have an impact on the economy of Western New York as well, development officials said. "Historically, new products and software have spun out of areas where computers are more cutting-edge," said Ronald Coan, executive director of the Erie County Industrial Development Agency. The supercomputer center in Norton Hall on UB's Amherst campus actually contains two main computers: - IBM Corp.'s RS/6000 SP, valued at $3.8 million. The successor to "Deep Blue" has 58 processors that work independently, breaking a problem into chunk and resembling the answer. - Silicon Graphics Inc.'s Graphics Origin2000, valued at $2.3 million. The machine's 64 processors can work together and access shared memory. That makes it especially useful for simulation problems, such as modeling the flow of air over the airplane's wing. In addition, the center includes a $300,000 machine from Sun Microsystems, chiefly for training students in supercomputer programming techniques, Miller said. A $200,000 piece of Silicon Graphics "visualization" equipment will aid computer modeling, and work stations and personal computers worth another $200,000 will support the center. Discounts from list price mean the funding necessary for the center comes to less than the equipment value. In addition, UB will spend about $400,000 on building and office-related expenses connected to the center. The two main machines have a combined capability of 60 billion operations per second -- 60 "gigaflops" in computer parlance, Miller said. That's enough capacity to process in one day a task that would take a high-end Pentium computer two years to complete. Researchers currently send projects to one of two academic supercomputer sites, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the San Diego Supercomputing Center. But supercomputer time is tight, as the number of computational projects grows and federal funding declines, a research expert said. "The amount of really high-end computing (available for research) has declined," said Linda Callahan, associate director of Cornell University's supercomputer center. "The machines they have are not meeting the demand." The UB supercomputer, at 60 gigaflops, will have about three-quarters of the computing horse-power of Cornell's "Theory Center" in Ithaca, established in 1984 as one of the first academic supercomputer sites. Helping to offset the glut of demand for supercomputer time is a plunge in the price of computer power, allowing what would have been a $50 million supercomputer center several years ago to be purchased now for under $10 million, experts said. In addition, computer makers such as IBM and Silicon Graphics frequently grant part of the cost to universities in return for shared research -- a factor that contributed to funding the UB center, Miller said. Other universities will likely follow UB's steps as supercomputer power becomes more of necessity than an option at research universities, experts said. "What UB has done is exactly what a research university preparing itself to enter the 21st century should be doing," said Larry Smarr, a member of a White House technology advisory committee. The decision to develop the supercomputer center in Buffalo came after former university provost Thomas E. Headrick requested a study of computer research needs. The study found that numerous researchers needed more supercomputer time to pursue their projects, Miller said.<
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