On The Road
SC2004
By Ric Kositzke, Technical Writer, ARL MSRC/Raytheon
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| SC2004 HPCMP booth put together by ERDC MSRC. |
Displayed in a unique configuration of 12 20-inch LCD screens called RenderWall, Dr. Jubaraj Sahu’s Transonic Projectile Aerodynamics demonstration caused even the greenest of supercomputing neophytes to wander to the HPCMO booth and ask, What is that? (See page 14)
For good reason. His project, which predicted among other things the static aerodynamic, Magnus moment and rolldamping coefficients of a standard spinning projectile, not only accurately simulated the projectile’s flow field, but the RenderWall allowed for a full view, parametric analysis of the flow fields.
Such is life at the yearly Supercomputing Conference where attendees expect substance to collide with style.
At SC2004, held in the new David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh, Pa., from Nov. 6-12, the theme “Bridging Communities” was very apt as the HPC community arrived in the steel city with hopes of exchanging ideas, celebrating past successes and planning for the future. The standard SC fare–technical programs, education outreach, exhibits–was met with SC’s latest innovation: StorCloud, a storage capability that showcased HPC storage technologies comprised of state of the art heterogeneous devices and technology to build a virtual on-site “storage on request” area network capability to support researchers and demonstrate high bandwidth applications at the conference.
“StorCloud is a new program highlight to bring new comminuties to the conference and is a multi-vendor resource available to conference participants”,” said Dr. Jeffrey C. Huskamp, SC2004 General Chair.
The ARL MSRC and Raytheon were among the volunteers from government, industry and academia that led and planned the initiative and supplied the manpower at the StorCloud booth.
StorCloud showcased:
- Evolutionary and revolutionary HPC storage technologies in a heterogeneous environment.
- Provided ~850 Terabytes of randomly accessible storage to SC2004 participants.
- Provided ~2.3 Terabits per second infrastructure bandwidth.
- Four Challenge Applications that stretched StorCloud to its limits.
- Six non-challenge applications exercising other dimensions of storage.
Storage, file system and software vendors contributed equipment and expertise to the initiative for the duration of SC2004. The storage equipment were attached and assigned to host platforms throughout the convention on an as requested basis. Host platforms were partitioned, formatted, and used the storage as needed. Sharing devices will also be accommodated between cooperating parties. StorCloud was architected and deployed entirely by volunteers from government, industry and academia.
“It was through hard work, dedication and collaboration amongst all of our partners that made StorCloud a reality and success,” said Virginia To, SC2004 Executive Director and StorCloud Chair.
The HPCMP’s contributions to SC2004 were well recognized in the HPC community. It encompassed the featured RenderWall, a 23-million pixel display composed of a 3x4 matrix of LCD screens, several demonstrations of projects from each of the four MSRCs, innovations in heterogeneous storage and unsurpassed bandwidth in SCinet.