The High Performance Computing (HPC) Group (also known as the Research Computing Group) has had another successful year. Dr. Marina Kraeva joined the HPC Group and is working well with Drs. James Coyle and Jim Hoekstra. They provide training in the use of AIT’s SGI Origin 2000 and Alpha Farm, manage these machines, and provide assistance with porting, parallelizing, debugging, and optimizing codes for these machines as well as other computers both on campus and off campus. Currently, the HPC Group also includes 8 graduate students and has been working on many different projects under contract for Cray and SGI. One of our projects has been to evaluate the performance of the MPI-1 communication routines, MPI-2 one-sided communication routines, SHMEM communication routines on a 512 processor SGI Origin 2000 and a 512 processor Cray T3E-600.

This past year, the Alpha Farm has been upgraded from 6 DEC 3000/900’s plus a file server and Gigaswitch to a single Compaq Alpha XP1000 machine with 2 GB of memory. This new machine provides significantly more computing power at a lower cost of ownership. The Gigaswitch will be sold and the 6 machines will be redeployed as fileservers.

This past year, the HPC Group has been responsible for supporting the 23 faculty (and their graduate students) in the HPC Partnership and the 16 processor SGI Origin 2000 that they are using. Additional information about the HPC Partnership follows.

In the spring of 1999, the Provost allocated $200,000 in seed monies to the Director of Academic Information Technology (AIT) in support of Iowa State University’s computational science and engineering initiative. To support this initiative, a High Performance Computing (HPC) Partnership has since been created in which faculty and the Director of AIT have combined resources and purchased a 16-processor SGI Origin 2000 computer. This computer is being used both for research and for courses that require a high performance computer.

The purpose of the HPC Partnership is to build a high performance computational facility and keep it current over time through active cost-sharing between faculty and the AIT and through supporting grants. With separate funds, the AIT will maintain these computing facilities. Under the direction of Professor Glenn Luecke, Iowa State University’s HPC Group will provide training in the use of these facilities and assistance with porting, parallelizing, debugging, and optimizing codes for this machine.

Having this machine available to faculty is already making a difference in faculty research efforts. For example having access to our SGI Origin computer has allowed James Vary, Professor of Physics at ISU, along with two colleagues at the University of Arizona to have a paper in the prestigious physics journal, Physical Review Letters. This journal is dedicated to publishing only ground breaking research results. Having access to our SGI Origin 2000 coupled with the expertise of the HPC Group is enabling ISU researchers to be world leaders in their research endeavors.