November 13, 2008

Purdue SuperComputing '08 presence mixes projects to enable scientific productivity, education, fun

The presentations are part of the activity in Purdue's booth at the conference - called SC08 - where visitors also will get a chance to build and manage their own supercomputers. The event is the premier international gathering for high-performance computing, networking, storage and analysis.

The booth at the world's largest high-performance computing conference is designed to promote Purdue; Information Technology at Purdue, which is the university's central information technology organization; and the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing, ITaP's research and discovery arm.

The theme of the Purdue booth this year is "No cycle left behind, no byte left unexplored." That relates to the creative ways ITaP is finding to improve scientific productivity, said John Campbell, associate vice president for information technology, who heads the Rosen Center. For example, Purdue's more than 20,000-processor strong Condor pool, a high-throughput distributed computing system that makes use of otherwise idle machines in offices, labs and elsewhere for research purposes, is a project set to be highlighted in a colorful animated short film at the conference.

"We will be demonstrating a series of projects that we have implemented or expanded during the past year," Campbell said.

Purdue's booth also will provide information to potential students and to job seekers about university academic programs and positions with ITaP and the Rosen Center.

The booth could attract computer game fans as well. Purdue-designed Rack-A-Node is a "tower-defense" strategy game that has players build and operate a simulated supercomputer to manage waves of science jobs in fields ranging from climate-modeling and physics to chemistry and pharmacy, said Kyle Bowen, manager of ITaP's informatics team, which created the game.

Rack-A-Node players will start with a small computer and have to manage a series of jobs successfully to earn funding to buy an even larger machine and advance to subsequent levels of the game.

Purdue's booth also will feature two presentations on the HUBzero technology developed at the university, which makes it easy for researchers to create "electronic virtual organizations" for connecting with colleagues throughout the world and sharing ideas, computational resources and data. The technology also makes it possible to deliver in integrated fashion simulation tools, tutorials and workshops, podcasts and other resources via the Internet.

Purdue has become a recognized leader in such "cyberinfrastructure" with the development of HUBzero, which powers nanoHUB.org and many other Web-based "hubs" for scientific collaboration, said Michael McLennan, senior research scientist and hub technology architect at Purdue and the Rosen Center.

McLennan will give presentations on the HUBzero platform while Purdue electrical and computer engineering Professor Gerhard Klimeck will talk about nanoHUB, an international resource for nanotechnology theory, simulation and education that now has tens of thousands of users.

Purdue presentations also will focus on taking advantage of the many processors available in high-performance computing systems today and set to burgeon with the advent of petascale computers capable of more than a thousand trillion calculations per second. Presenters will include Alex Pothen, head of Purdue's Computing Research Institute; Faisal Saied, a senior research scientist at the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing and the Computing Research Institute; and Rudolf Eigenmann, professor of electrical and computer engineering and technical director of the Computing Research Institute.

Writer: Greg Kline, (765) 494-8167, gkline@purdue.edu

Sources: John Campbell, (765) 494-1289, john-campbell@purdue.edu

Michael McLennan, (765) 494-6495, mmclennan@purdue.edu

Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; purduenews@purdue.edu

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