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UB TO CLUSTER 64 COMPUTERS INTO SUPERCOMPUTER SUBSTITUTE
Published on July 1, 1999
Author: FRED O. WILLIAMS
© The Buffalo News Inc.
The University at Buffalo's latest research project is akin to building a Formula One race car from the shelves of a Parts Plus store.
But the project involves a computer, not a car -- actually 64 computers from Sun Microsystems Inc. in Palo Alto, Calif. In a research partnership with Sun, UB researchers will link the relatively inexpensive machines into a "cluster" that they call "a poor man's supercomputer," the university announced. "The commercial cost (of the cluster) would be in the neighborhood of $200,000 -- you can't buy a supercomputer for that," said Charles Brunskill, a UB network expert and co-leader of the project at UB's Center for Computational Research. The task will both enhance UB's status as a computer powerhouse and give it a third supercomputer to run alongside the two that were unveiled in January. The $7 million worth of computer equipment already at UB's North Campus puts the university among the top 10 U.S. academic computer sites. "We're establishing ourselves," Brunskill said. "As you start getting credibility, it gets easier" to attract important projects. Under the partnership with Sun, UB will write software to harness the 64 machines and test their performance against supercomputers from IBM Corp. and Silicon Graphics Inc. Years from now, the code developed at UB could run similar clusters for schools and corporations around the world, university officials said. UB expects the cluster to crank out 30 billion operations per second, a measure of processing power that's on a par with supercomputer speeds. "We want to make this one of the top 500 most powerful computers in the world," Brunskill said. Sun's Sparc workstations, about twice as powerful as a high-end Pentium machine, work on a different processing architecture than the ubiquitous Intel-type chip. That means programming to divide problems into 64 pieces for the Sun machines must be designed from scratch. Although PCs and IBM workstations have already been clustered to multiply their power, the technique is a first for Sun machines, supercomputer center director Russ Miller said. But since the Sun equipment and its non-proprietary Unix operating system are already popular on college campuses, the potential payoff for the work could be far-reaching. The Sun cluster will run on the free Linux version of Unix, an operating system that controls the basic functions of computers. Similarly, the code that UB develops will be a free resource for other institutions wishing to cobble together a cluster of Sun machines, Brunskill said. However, it will take several years to develop the programming tools that will allow the cluster to compete evenly with supercomputers, he added. Cluster computing is part of a trend that challenges single-box supercomputers the way networked PCs overthrew the mainframe starting in the 1980s, computer experts said. "Making high-performance computing affordable is a really good goal," said Linda Callahan, associate director of Cornell University's Theory Center, one of four original academic supercomputer sites in the United States. Cornell is building a cluster of low-end machines based on the Intel processor and Microsoft's NT operating system. In tests, the inexpensive eight-machine cluster performed faster, chip for chip, than the center's IBM mainframe, she said. At the computer center on UB's North Campus, researchers have installed the 64 Sun boxes in racks seven-feet high and started to think about how to connect them through a telecommunications switch. Seemingly small details are important -- for example, the cable to each machine will be a uniform 20-foot length, eliminating tiny differences in transmission speed that could throw off calculations. "Getting it running is the first step," Brunskill said.MELANIE KIMBLER/Buffalo NewsRuss Miller, left, and Charles Brunskill, co-leaders of the UB Center for Computational Research, stand before the 64 Sun Microsystems computers that they are turning into a "poor man's supercomputer."
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