"The combination of actual reliability, performance and ease of porting UNIX applications to the new systems architecture exceeded even our highest expectations."
-- Dr. John Sobolewski, co-principal investigator

The primary goal of the world-class Maui High-Performance Computing Center (MHPCC) is to provide R&D supercomputing for United States Air Force and Department of Defense labs and their contractors. Other aims: fostering technology exchange programs in high-performance computing among the governmental, academic and industrial communities stimulating economic development contributing to R&D in software for scalable parallel processors supporting collaboration to address Grand Challenge problems.

To address these research requirements, the MHPCC installed as its central computing complex one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world – an IBM 400-processor RS/6000 Scalable POWERparallel System SP.

Scientists and engineers across the United States can harness its raw power -- peak capability: over 100 billion floating point operations (flops) per second -- through high-speed networks, primarily the widely used Internet.

Why the SP?
"The main reason we selected the SP was that it incorporated the best technology available -- state-of-the-art processors, an operating system with a proven record and a very promising High-Performance Switch," says Dr. John Sobolewski. "The SP's combination of actual reliability, performance and ease of porting UNIX applications to the new systems architecture exceeded even our highest expectations."

Dr. Sobolewski is professor of electrical engineering at the University of New Mexico (UNM) Albuquerque, which holds the contract from the Air Force Phillips Laboratory for managing the MHPCC. UNM colleagues Dr. Frank Gilfeather, professor of mathematics, and Dr. Brian Smith, professor of computer science, are co-principal investigators with him at the Maui Center.

"You need a machine that size to do things like weather prediction, molecular modeling to develop new drugs, and computational fluid dynamics to model a whole airplane in flight," says Dr. Gilfeather. "Currently, we can only do pieces at a time and fairly slowly. The national goal is that the United States will reach the teraflop (a trillion flops) level by the turn of the century. We're one-tenth of the way with this machine."

The MHPCC has initiated the longest, and only, high-capacity (T3, 45MB/sec.) fiber-optic link currently available -- from Hawaii to the Internet backbone in California. The transmission capacity of this link is greater than any current connection between the United States and Europe.

Researchers who need to solve computational problems or work with images that require great computing speed and memory are able to tap directly into the resources of the center through this high-speed link. The MHPCC's Scalable POWERparallel System processes applications for some 600 active users.

One example: Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Pa., has undertaken the development of a new technology that will make more museum artifacts available to the public through the use of computers -- allowing them to be manipulated and viewed from any side at any angle.

Threshold of an exciting future
"Using our stereo vision program, we're trying to build three-dimensional models and run the algorithms on the SP so people at a distance can interact with them, on the Internet, for example," explains Dr. Jon Webb, senior system scientist at CMU. "A compiler program we developed here does a data parallel implementation of the code, where the image is divided up among processors, and then each processor does part of the work on its section of the image.

"I've worked on various experimental parallel processors, and not so experimental machines, and I've not seen one like the SP. It's the first machine that really works, that really delivers what it's supposed to deliver."

The CMU is using artifacts from Honolulu's Bishop Museum as a test case. "We believe that, with Dr. Webb's work, the day will soon arrive when it will not be necessary to see an actual specimen or object, some of which are simply too delicate to handle," says the museum's Dr. W. Donald Duckworth. "We sit on the threshold of an entirely new museum era -- an exciting future for us all."

On the leading edge of technology
"I had our application running on the SP only two hours after I received my user account," points out Capt. Bradley J. Smith, Phillips Laboratories, Kirtland Air Force Base. "Recently we ran in parallel a full-scale simulation of a massive satellite/space debris collision resulting in nearly two thousand debris fragments. The SP gave us results -- with a resolution five times greater -- where previous attempts at solving this problem elsewhere had failed."

Stephen Scherr, mathematician, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) group, Wright Laboratory, Wright Patterson Air Force Base: "The SP is being used right now by the materials modeling group studying the new chemical structure for composite aircraft wings, as well as by our flight dynamics and structural mechanics people. In a lot of ways, it's the machine we've been looking for, and it's performed very well for us. We're staying on the leading edge of technology by using the SP."

As a key hub of the proposed Global Information Infrastructure -- a bridge between the East and the West -- interest in the Maui Center is rising, and projects are being explored with researchers in Japan and other Pacific Rim countries.

"The Internet is everywhere in the U.S. and, in some sense, around the world, but its qualities are very different, depending on where you are," says co-principal investigator Brian Smith. "We're trying to encourage and create connectivity between technology centers that is direct and more reliable, robust and faster than what we're working with now."

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