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["Greg H. Wood" <>]

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Karen Green
National Center for Supercomputing Applications


Alliance Grid to Star at Chautauquas 99I2-NEWS: News Release (fwd)

CHAMPAIGN, IL, July 13, 1999-- Researchers and educators attending the
National Computational Science Alliance's (Alliance) Chautauquas technology
road shows this summer will have the chance to experience firsthand how the
Alliance Grid will change the way people work, communicate and conduct
research in the 21st century. 

 Chautauquas are scheduled for Aug. 9 and 10 at the University of New
Mexico in Albuquerque, Aug. 23 and 24 at the University of Kentucky in
Lexington, and Sept. 14 at 15 at Boston University. Named for a Seneca
Indian word meaning meeting or gathering, the Chautauquas will capture the
spirit of the original Chautauqua movement of the early 20th century, when
traveling educational meetings were used to disseminate information about
new technologies and concepts. 

The Alliance Grid, a prototype national computational and information
infrastructure, is an emerging integrated computational and collaborative
environment that links people, resources and services over high-speed
networks. Part of the Alliance Grid is the Access Grid, an integrated
environment that supports distributed meetings, remote visualization,
tele-immersion, and distance education. In essence, the Access Grid is a
system that allows remote access to resources and interaction with data and
collaborators. 

The Alliance's three Chautauquas 99 sites--the University of New Mexico,
the University of Kentucky, and Boston University--are three of the early
nodes on the Access Grid, giving researchers, educators, students and the
general public entry points into this new system of online work
environments and collaborative interaction spaces.  

"The Chautauquas will give new audiences the chance to experience the
possibilities of the Grid, including remote collaborative tutorials and
seminars that allow for group interactions," said Larry Smarr, director of
the Alliance and the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA)
at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the leading-edge site
for the Alliance. "The Grid is really a preview of the work and educational
environment of the 21st century."

The Chautauquas are the first stage of the Alliance's comprehensive plan to
deploy sites as Grid access points and will introduce a wider group of
university researchers and educators to Grid technologies. Each Chautauqua
will feature interactive demonstrations and seminars, conducted from
Alliance partner sites across the country live over the Grid. While this
type of interactive participation is currently available through
high-priced, proprietary telecommunications technologies, the Chautauquas
will showcase emerging technologies that are beginning to offer readily
accessible and affordable alternatives. While still experimental, five or
10 years down the road the Grid is expected to be the norm, driving future
scientific research and technology development.


Sessions will include the Alliance's vision for a new digital community,
presented by Smarr, and an overview of federal technology initiatives,
presented by a representative of the National Science Foundation. Multicast
demonstrations will be presented from remote sites across the Alliance,
including Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, IL; NCSA in
Urbana-Champaign, IL; and the Alliance Center for Collaboration Education,
Science and Software (ACCESS) in Arlington, VA.  

Chautauquas also will include discussions of how state-of-the-art
technologies are enhancing research and education and sessions highlighting
advances in visualization and cluster technologies. Each Chautauqua host
site will also offer targeted tutorials and events of interest to their
region. 

For more on Alliance Chautauquas 99 including registration information, see
(http://alliance.ncsa.uiuc.edu/chautauqua/).  

The National Computational Science Alliance is a partnership to prototype
an advanced computational infrastructure for  the 21st century and includes
more than 50 academic, government and industry research partners from
across the United States. The Alliance is one of two partnerships funded by
the National Science Foundation's Partnerships for Advanced Computational
Infrastructure (PACI) program, and receives cost-sharing at partner
institutions. NSF also supports the National Partnership for Advanced
Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), led by the San Diego Supercomputer
Center.
 
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is the leading-edge
site for the National Computational Science Alliance. NCSA is a leader in
the development and deployment of cutting-edge high-performance computing,
networking, and information technologies. The National Science Foundation,
the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, industrial partners, and
other federal agencies fund NCSA. 

###


---------------------------------------------------             
Karen Green
Public Information Officer
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
Champaign, IL 61820

ph: 217-265-0748, fax: 217-244-7396 
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/
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From: Karen Green 
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Subject: NEWS: Alliance's NT Supercluster Expands to 256 Processors
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Contact: Karen Green, NCSA Public Information Officer, 
,
 217.265.0748

***Alliance's NT Supercluster Expands to 256 Processors*** 

CHAMPAIGN, IL, July 13, 1999--The National Center for Supercomputing
Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
recently took delivery of 64 dual processor Hewlett-Packard
(http://www.hp.com/) Kayak workstations, upgrading its NT  Supercluster to
256 processors in two 128 HP Kayak systems.  

The new HP machines feature 550 MHz Intel Pentium III Xeon processors, with
nearly double the speed of the supercluster's 300 MHz Pentium II
processors. The new processors also feature 1 gigabyte of memory per
machine, double the amount in the supercluster's Pentium II machines. 

 The supercluster was built in 1998 by a National Computational Science
Alliance (Alliance) team based at NCSA to provide a low-cost alternative to
conventional supercomputers. It uses high-speed Myrinet
(http://www.myri.com) interconnects for MPI applications and a software
package called High Performance Virtual Machine (HPVM), native NT-based
Fast Messaging (FM) software that enables the nodes of the cluster to
communicate at bandwidths of more than 92 megabytes per second using MPI-FM
and allows scaling on multiple NT-based systems. HPVM was developed by the
Concurrent Systems Architecture Group (http://www-csag.ucsd.edu), led by
Andrew Chien, an Alliance researcher based at the University of California
at San Diego.

The new 128-processor component of the supercluster has already achieved
performance of more than 14 gigaflops on an application called AS-PCG (for
Additive Schwarz Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient), a code used to solve
large linear equations that arise in computational fluid dynamics problems.
This performance is similar to the 17 gigaflop performance achieved for
AS-PCG on the 128 processor, 250 MHz SGI Origin2000 array.

"These new processors give the cluster a major boost in speed and that
means better performance on the scientific applications that use the
cluster," said Rob Pennington, technical program manager of the NT
Supercluster Group at NCSA
(http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/CC/ntcluster/). "These new machines were
put into use within a week of coming online and we've been pleased with the
results."

In the last month, three applications have proven to be scalable to the
full 256 processors of the supercluster. One is the AS-PCG code, developed
by Danesh Tafti of the Alliance Environmental Hydrology team. Another is
ZEUS-MP, a parallel hydrodynamics code which is designed for simulating
phenomena in astrophysics and other branches of science. On the
supercluster, ZEUS-MP is being used to perform a simplified simulation of
the burn of a solid-fuel rocket booster. The third application is MILC (for
MIMD Lattice Calculation), a code used to compute the theory governing the
behavior of quarks and gluons. 

According to Pennington, more than half of the hours on the supercluster
went to user applications during June. More than half of this time was
dedicated to jobs that ran for more than 1,000 hours and two-thirds was
spent on applications that required at least 32 processors.

"The cluster project is focused on providing a stable, large-scale NT-based
environment for MPI applications," said Pennington. "The recent upgrade and
the usage during the last month shows that we are serious about offering
our users a viable alternative to Big Iron supercomputing."

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is the leading-edge
site for the National Computational Science Alliance. NCSA is a leader in
the development and deployment of cutting-edge high-performance computing,
networking, and information technologies. The National Science Foundation,
the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, industrial partners, and
other federal agencies fund NCSA. 

The National Computational Science Alliance is a partnership to prototype
an advanced computational infrastructure for the 21st century and includes
more than 50 academic, government and industry research partners from
across the United States. The Alliance is one of two partnerships funded by
the National Science Foundation's Partnerships for Advanced Computational
Infrastructure (PACI) program, and receives cost-sharing at partner
institutions.  NSF also supports the National Partnership for Advanced
Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), led by the San Diego Supercomputer
Center. 

The High Performance Virtual Machines (HPVM) software package is available
from the Concurrent Systems Architecture Group (http://www-csag.ucsd.edu)
at the University of California,  San Diego. The CSAG group is led by
Professor Andrew A. Chien, and these efforts are supported by NSF, DARPA,
NASA, Myricom, Microsoft, Tandem Computer, Intel, and Platform Computing. 

###




---------------------------------------------------             
Karen Green
Public Information Officer
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
605 E. Springfield Ave.
Champaign, IL 61820

ph: 217-265-0748, fax: 217-244-7396 
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/
----------------------------------------------------

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