In fall 2002, the Graduate Education and Research Services (GEaRS) group&-a part of Academic Services and Emerging Technologies (ASET)-deployed its third-generation Linux cluster, Lion-XL, to provide computational resources for research projects in a variety of departments and disciplines across the University.
Clusters (many computers networked together) are rapidly gaining momentum as a cost-competitive approach to scientific and engineering computing. A cluster of computers, or "compute servers" combined with scheduling software to distribute the computing tasks, allows standard and readily available equipment to offer computational speed comparable to far more expensive proprietary computer systems.
Lion-XL, the fastest and most powerful cluster Penn State has built to date, has now been expanded from 80 to 176 nodes. The theoretical peak capacity of this cluster is nearly 1 TeraFlop (one trillion floating point operations per second). It is enabling research computations in the areas of materials simulation, computational biology and chemistry, mathematics, meteorology, physics, and other disciplines. 128 nodes of Lion-XL will have a high-speed network from Quadrics, a company based in the United Kingdom. All 176 nodes are also connected together with Fast Ethernet. GEaRS is also deploying fileserver technology from BlueArc, in order to provide a unified file space across all of its high performance computing clusters.
The University's clusters, Lion-XE and Lion-XL, are a collaborative partnership among several faculty members spanning three colleges and ASET, a unit of Information Technology Services (ITS). The partnership is aimed at consolidating and therefore increasing the resources available to each participant, as well as decreasing the duplication of efforts inherent in smaller systems. "Instead of researchers deploying small clusters in their offices.it's far more productive to build larger machines," says Vijay Agarwala, Director of GEaRS. "Larger machines, when properly run, significantly lower the cost of ownership." This collaborative partnership is open to all faculty members.
For more information on using these new resources, or to learn how to become a partner, check the Web site at http://gears.aset.psu.edu/.