Director's Forum
Welcome to another issue of Link. Since our last issue this spring, the ARL MSRC has been at the forefront of some important research, notably Dr. Robert Meakin's work for NASA as part of its study on what caused the tragic accident of the Columbia space shuttle Feb. 1. Dr. Meakin, whose research is profiled in Brian J. Wagner's story on page 10 and was later included in NASA's Columbia Investigation Board's findings in August, used several of the ARL MSRC's high performance computers, including Zornig and Brainerd, to run coupled, CFD and trajectory simulations of the moving insulation. Dr. Meakin also worked closely with Mark Bolstad to run remote scientific visualizations of his research.
Speaking of high performance computing, the ARL MSRC bolstered its computing prowess by adding a new 286-processor Linux Networx Evolocity II system, the first large-scale cluster in the HPCMP. The commodity cluster, which HPC users can start using this month, is based on 3.06 GHZ Intel IA-32 processors, arranged in 128 two-processor nodes. The cluster configuration is now an integral part of our HPC environment and will be utilized to perform large-scale scientific applications. The cluster environment is a new tool in our spectrum of HPC systems.
We've also added more capability to our center by upgrading our existing IBM p690 system, 64 processor, 1.3 GHZ, to IBM's Power4 system, 128 processor, 1.7 GHZ. Not surprising, the upgrade will give users a significant increase in computational capability and provide an introduction to the next generation switch technology. The upgraded system will be available for production use by the end of the fiscal year.
As always we strive to be responsive to our users' needs and time. We, therefore, were most excited about being able to provide you a webcast of an ARL MSRC users meeting on July 28 from Bldg. 328 at ARL. The webcast, which allowed us to remotely explain the accomplishments we've made here in the past year, also featured remarks by myself, Dr. Prabu Prabhakaran, Tom Kendall, Dr. Vinnie Natoli, the new HPTI PET Program lead, and Dr. Jose Renteria. Steve Thompson spearheaded the project and will hold another webcast on Nov. 13 at 1 p.m. for new HPC users.
Back in June, numerous personnel from ARL and Raytheon attended the Users Group Conference in Bellevue, Wa., June 9-13. During the conference, ARL researchers and technical personnel presented 13 papers, ranging from mass storage management technologies to computational chemistry. Make sure you check out Brian Simmonds's article about the conference on page 12.
In this Link, Jerry Clarke (page 8) gives readers an update on the Augmented Virtuality system and how, thanks to a little ingenuity and help from Kelly Kirk, it can be turned into a de facto sound card.
Our new technical writer, Ric Kositzke, profiles the Commodity Cluster Symposium (page 14) that was held in Tysons Corner, Va., July 22-23. The symposium featured expert speakers from the cluster community and detailed the key issues associated with commodity clusters used for scientific computing, namely the hardware and software requirements. The feedback from attendees was very positive and requests were made for a similar conference to be held next year.
Kositzke also sat down with Dr. Peter Chung for an interview (page 16). Dr. Chung, who is working on fascinating research in computational nanotechnology, describes what success means to researchers and scientists and the role his work plays for Army end-users.
Finally, I just want you to know that our entire ARL MSRC staff has been busy these past months working for you, our customers, and will continue to strive to make our HPC environment the best it can be. As always we are committed to fully supporting the DoD mission by providing a computational environment to help solve your research challenges. If you have any comments, please e-mail us at outreach@arl.army.mil.
We will meet again soon.
- Charlie