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Collaboration Leads to Success: Most Powerful Computer of its Kind in WNY Available World-Wide
BUFFALO, N.Y., April 10 /PRNewswire/ -- Local scientist Dr. Russ Miller
is leading the rollout of "Magic," one of the most powerful computers in
New York State to qualified users worldwide for solving
computationally-demanding problems.
New Methods Allow Scholars to Address Previously Unsolvable Problems
Cyberinfrastructure sits at the core of modern simulation and modeling,
which creates new methods of investigation that allow scholars to address
previously unsolvable problems, according to Miller who holds scientific
appointments at both Hauptman-Woodward as a senior scientist and at the
University at Buffalo as a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and
Engineering. The Miller Cyberinfrastructure Laboratory (MCIL) is taking
advantage of recent advances in technologies in order to link distributed
resources, including compute systems, data storage devices, visualization
systems, sensors, and a wide variety of instruments and make those
resources available worldwide.
"The work done by Dr. Miller's group, which was supported by an NSF
grant that also providing funding to Niagara University (NU) provided us
with the opportunity to acquire significant computing power and skills. It
also allowed us to train students on creating and utilizing modern
computing platforms," Dr. Mary McCourt, chair and professor of Chemistry at
NU, said. "We are excited to have immediate access to this new
state-of-the-art computing system, which enhances the resources of
Niagara's Academic Center for Integrated Sciences."
"We have been working on grid computing efforts with Russ and his group
for years," Dr. Charles M. Weeks, senior research scientist at HWI, said.
"These efforts have resulted in a number of joint research and funding
efforts. We are particularly anxious to experiment with this new trend in
high-performance computing as part of one of our jointly funded projects,
especially for some of HWI's computationally demanding applications."
Project History
The Miller Cyberinfrastructure Laboratory (MCIL) was founded at the
beginning of the 21st century by Miller who is widely recognized as a
leader in parallel computing, grid computing, and cyberinfrastructure.
Miller served as Founding Director of the UB Center for Computational
Research (CCR) from 1998-2006. Under Miller's direction, and with primary
funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes
of Health (NIH), a Buffalo-based grid was developed as an experimental way
to create an institutionally-distributed platform that integrated
information and computing. This led to the design, implementation, and
deployment of the Western New York Grid (WNY Grid), which aggregated costly
computational resources at institutions throughout WNY. The overwhelming
success of the WNY Grid led to the MCIL-deployed New York State Grid (NYS
Grid), based on the Open Science Grid set of grid software.
Magic is a state-of-the-art computer system located at UB's North
Campus which consists of graphics processing units typically reserved for
high-end gaming systems that are integrated into a traditional rack of
computers. Magic was delivered in late 2008 and is now available to users
worldwide. The system is cost-effective in solving large computational
problems in areas including bioinformatics, computational chemistry,
computational fluid dynamics, computational finance, medical imaging,
weather and ocean modeling.
Most Powerful Computer in WNY Available World-Wide
Why Is This Important?
Led by Miller, MCIL worked on platforms for monitoring grid systems,
for providing a single point-of-entry portal and for solving intricate
problems involving node swapping, predictive scheduling and resource
management. MCIL has been responsible for grid-enabling critical
applications in areas such as structural biology, bioinformatics, ground
water modeling, earthquake engineering and computational chemistry.
"The new partnership with NVIDIA and our ongoing partnership with Dell
have made possible the acquisition of a leading-edge machine, one of the
fastest in New York for solving a large set of scientific, engineering and
multimedia problems," Miller said. "In fact, due to the advances in
heterogeneous computing, this machine cost approximately 1/1000th of the
two machines in New York that have peak computing power exceeding this
machine. In particular, Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)-based systems are
affordable by many research groups and departments offering processing
capabilities thousands of times faster than traditional systems, whereas
traditional high-end clusters require extraordinary funds, space, cooling,
and staffing. This is also the fastest machine on the MCIL Grid for solving
many computationally-intensive problems."
Professor Jack Dongarra, one of the foremost authorities on high-end
computing and director of the Innovative Computing Laboratory at the
University of Tennessee said, "GPUs have evolved to the point where
real-world applications are easily implemented on them and run faster than
on multi-core systems. Future computing architectures will be hybrid
systems with parallel-core GPUs working in tandem with multi-core CPUs."
"The Tesla GPU-based clusters used by the Cyberinfrastructure
Laboratory are enabling its researchers to get supercomputing performance
from smaller clusters at 1/100th the cost, significantly improving the
scope and size of the research problems that they can solve. More
importantly they can do this while consuming less electricity, reducing the
carbon footprint required to power these systems and cool the data centers
that house them," Andy Keane, general manager, GPU Computing at NVIDIA,
said.
The NVIDIA-based GPU-system was acquired with funds from the National
Science Foundation's (NSF's) Collaborative Research Infrastructure (CRI)
Program based on a joint proposal from UB (Miller), Niagara (McCourt),
SUNY-Geneseo (Farian), and the Hauptman-Woodward Institute (Weeks). These
funds have been used previously to acquire compute clusters at each of
these institutions to support research, scholarship, and education at and
between these institutions. In fact, at Niagara University, the Academic
Center for Integrated Sciences, which will be housed in the new Thomas B.
Golisano science building, has benefitted immensely from this collaboration
in terms of intellectual and capital resources. The system was brought
on-line by Kevin Cleary, systems administrator in the UB Department of
Computer Science and Engineering, with guidance and assistance from Jon
Bednasz, senior systems administrator in the UB Center for Computational
Research.
About the Collaborators
For additional information, please contact Miller
(http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/faculty/miller/CI/) at miller@buffalo.edu. The
Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute (http://www.hwi.buffalo.edu) is an
independent, not-for-profit, biomedical research facility located in the
heart of downtown Buffalo's medical campus. HWI scientists study the 3-D
structures of protein molecules that play a role in the development of many
different diseases. Niagara University (http://www.niagara.edu) was founded in
1856 and has been in existence for 150 years and enrolls more than 3800
students. The University at Buffalo (http://www.buffalo.edu) is a premier
research-intensive public university. It is the largest and most
comprehensive campus in the SUNY system. Information on UB's Department of
Computer Science and Engineering is available at http://www.cse.buffalo.edu.
Information on CCR is available at http://www.ccr.buffalo.edu. NVIDIA
(http://www.nvidia.com) is the world leader in visual computing technologies and
the inventor of the GPU, a high-performance processor which generates
interactive graphics on workstations, personal computers, game consoles,
and mobile devices. Open Science Grid information is available at
http://www.opensciencegrid.org.
This news release was issued on behalf of Newswise(TM). For more
information, visit http://www.newswise.com.
Media Contacts: Tara A. Ellis, (716)898-8596 tellis@hwi.buffalo.edu
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