New super computer at Arizona State will have enormous potential for researchers

Better designs for airplanes and automobiles, super-hard materials, transistors the size of molecules and better weather forecasts are among the developments that could emerge from a super- computing center opening Sept. 16 at Arizona State University.

Called the Fulton High Performance Computing Initiative, the center will feature a central cluster of 200 Dell servers, each with two Intel microprocessors, that work in tandem to create a super computer performing up to 2 trillion mathematical computations a second.

In the ultrafast world of supercomputing, that ranks "Saguaro," as the ASU supercomputer is called, as the 175th fastest supercomputer in the world, director Dan Stanzione said.

By comparison, the world’s fastest machine, IBM’s "Big Blue/L" at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, performs about 136 trillion computations a second. But ASU’s machine ranks as the fastest nonmilitary computer in Arizona, Stanzione said.

"There may be faster computers at Fort Huachuca, but if so, they’re classified," he said.

The $2 million facility located at the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering on ASU’s Tempe campus also will contain a small research computer built by Cray Research and other computer clusters used by ASU research groups that are being centralized in one location and connected into a campus computer grid.

The bottom line will be faster results for researchers who need to crunch a lot of numbers, Stanzione said.

"We’re accelerating innovation," he said.

"In a lot of these areas like nanotechnology or weather forecasting that are very small or very complex, it’s hard to do actual experiments. Instead you have to do simulations, and that requires a lot of computations. We have put together enough computational firepower to do that kind of research at a competitive rate."

The computer center will be available for free to faculty members in the engineering school and at a low subsidized rate to faculty in other ASU departments. It will also be available to researchers in private industry, but at a higher cost.

Also, the center will offer consulting to researchers on how they can use supercomputer clusters to simulate specific problems they are trying to solve.

Among the types of simulations that will be performed on the center’s computers will be air flow patterns over airplanes and motor vehicles to produce designs that are more fuel efficient and experiments with materials that can withstand extreme temperatures and could be used in high temperature power plants that burn coal more cleanly.

The center will work with the university’s Biodesign Institute on such studies as the structure of viruses and improving delivery of medications.

To prevent obsolescence, the center has been designed to incorporate future technology upgrades. It also can be expanded.

"We will probably update a quarter to one third of our hardware every year," Stanzione said.

Rick Shangraw, executive director of the Decision Theater at ASU, which helps government, community and business leaders solve problems by visualizing them through computer models, said the center will provide a big boost for his program.

"A model that used to take a week to run can be done in a day, and we want to refine it further to run in a matter of seconds so we can see the impact of changes in assumptions in real time," he said.

As an example, he said the Decision Theater is working with a group of cities, tribes and water districts in the East Valley to determine the future of ground water resources in the region using various drought and population assumptions.

Having the computational power of the computing center will be "very helpful" in determining groundwater availability under different scenarios, he said.

Another advantage of the center will be increased opportunities to train students, said Kyle Squires, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering.

"Right now we do research for the Air Force, and we have access to supercomputing centers around the country," he said. "Now some of those calculations will be done here, and in the not too distant future all of them may be done here. That makes you a lot more efficient . . . when you don’t have to coordinate with a lot of people around the country."