Contact: Bob Ratliff
Mississippi State University is once again on the list of the world's most powerful computer sites.
The latest "TOP500" list of supercomputer sites shows MSU's Engineering Research Center has the 158th most powerful computer in the world, 85th most powerful at any U.S. facility and 13th at any American university. Mississippi State also has the only TOP500 site in the Southeastern Conference.
The list is based on data compiled and released twice a year by the universities of Mannheim (Germany) and Tennessee.
MSU first made the list in 1996, debuting at 359th and has moved to its current position thanks to a new system that is actually a cluster of computers, said Engineering Research Center computer specialist Roger Smith.
"In its current configuration, the cluster contains 165 dual-processor Pentium III computers using special software and a high-speed network to make them function like a single supercomputer," he said.
Clustering to create supercomputers is a recent trend, but Smith noted it is an area Mississippi State pioneered more than a decade ago.
"The ERC started research with clusters in 1987, and the current system is our fifth generation cluster," he said. "The benefit of a cluster is that it lets you create a lot of computing power using off-the-shelf personal computers and other readily available hardware at a cost much lower than a traditional supercomputer."
The ERC cluster is extremely powerful, including 3.5 terabytes of disk space. A terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes, or one trillion characters. The system has 165 gigabytes of memory, the equivalent of almost 34 million typed pages, which if laid end-to-end would stretch almost 6,000 miles. Another important element is the Message Passing Interface, or MPI, software developed in part at Mississippi State.
Scientists in the ERC's Computational Simulation and Design Center use the Mississippi State supercomputer for computational fluid dynamics research, with applications as diverse as submarines, surface ships, tiltrotor aircraft, turbomachinery, and automobile components.
"The cluster is well equipped for computational fluid dynamics, which involves solving large, complex mathematical problems," Smith said. "In fact, if you could do one long division problem per second with a pencil, it would take more than 10,000 years to do what the computer can do in one second."
There are plans to double the capacity of the cluster in the next few months, which should keep the MSU site on the TOP500 list, but making the list is secondary to the benefits the equipment provides, according to SimCenter director David Whitfield.
"The TOP500 list is a bonus, but computer technology changes quickly," he said. "Keeping up with changes is a vital part of MSU research in support of the Department of Defense and NASA, as well as state and national industries."
Computing resources at the ERC have helped the center generate more than $20 million in annual research expenditures.