UB and Sun Microsystems to Develop ‘Poor Man’s Supercomputer’

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- The Center for Computational Research at the University at Buffalo and Sun Microsystems have launched a research partnership aimed at developing a network of high-end workstations that will deliver the power of a supercomputer at a fraction of the cost.

"While it has become commonplace to link together tens, or even a hundred or so PCs into a tightly coupled cluster, this is the first time such an approach will be tied to high-end Sun workstations," said Russ Miller, CCR director and UB professor of computer science.

At the core of the project is a collection of 64 Sun Ultra 5 333Mhz workstations, which were acquired with a grant from Sun Microsystems and matching funds from UB.

"We're developing a poor man's supercomputer," said Corky Brunskill, director of Science and Engineering Node Services (SENS) at UB and co-leader of the project with Miller.

This high-visibility, first-of-its-kind project -- undertaken at UB by CCR and SENS -- casts the university as a member of the product-development team for one of the world's major hardware developers.

"This partnership is very important to Sun's overall committment to our customers," said Kim Jones, vice president of Sun Microsystem's Global Education and Research Group. "It provides them with their desired solution. Sun's HPC (high performance computing) offering consists not only of our industry-leading SMP servers, but we also offer a wide range of clustering solutions which will now include Beowulf."

"For some applications, this type of architecture represents the future of supercomputers," said Miller. "It's the first step toward a whole new methodology of supercomputing."

Miller and Brunskill noted that today's supercomputers feature many tools and enhancements that less-powerful platforms cannot support; therefore, the workstation cluster is still several years away from competing with today's general-purpose supercomputers.

However, in applications where certain integration tools are not critical, including computation for certain scientific problems, data mining, mail serving and Web hosting, the UB researchers say that workstation clusters quickly may become viable competitors to the big machines.

"If this works, scientists who crank out complex simulations on supercomputers that today cost several million dollars will someday be able to do it on machines that only cost a few hundred thousand," said Brunskill.

To develop the workstation cluster, the UB researchers will use Linux, a UNIX-type operating system -- the system of choice for scientific applications on PCs -- which has several advantages over UNIX:

• Linux is free software available to anyone on the Internet, so users are not committed to a single vendor

• It provides users with a very efficient operating system seen as comparable to the more expensive UNIX systems

• It is usable on a variety of computing platforms, including Intel, PowerPC, Alpha or Sparc, which is the one Sun operates on its workstations, among others.

"Linux is like a car that just has a body and an engine," said Brunskill. "It's software that's had all the bells and whistles taken off so it's lighter and more powerful."

In addition, since it is available to the public, any software developer can write code for Linux and port it to any other hardware platform running the Linux operating system.

The UB researchers will use Beowulf software to tie the 64 individual workstations together.

"Beowulf allows you to treat and manage the workstation cluster as a single resource, rather than having to manage 64 independent computers," explained Miller.

Networking capabilities will be provided by a Nortel switch, which allows machines to share a lot of information very quickly.

An important part of the project will be to validate and benchmark the new system against the big machines that CCR has.

In addition to Miller and Brunskill, the UB team includes Tom Furlani, associate director of CCR; Dave Yearke and Bob Meyer, SENS systems administrators; Mike Sparkes, CIT networking engineer, and several graduate and undergraduate students from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.

"This is the research component of what our center is all about: developing new tools to advance the science of computation," Miller said.

Added Brunskill: "We're doing real science in partnership with Sun. For our students and our researchers, these types of projects are critical."

The UB researchers expect to be able to successfully demonstrate the concept by the fall.