MRI: Acquisition of a Shared Memory High Performance Computer for Modeling and Data Analysis in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences

Princeton University, Princeton NJ

Investigators

Abstract

This MRI award will serve to purchase a 256 Processor/1536 core SGI Altix UV1000 with 9.2 TB of RAM and 14.4 TB of raw scratch disk space. The instrument will provide scientists at Princeton University, the Institute for Advanced Studies, and partner institutions with the computational resources needed to model multi-scale phenomena in the sciences and engineering. The flexibility of the Altix architecture, which supports both shared and distributed memory applications, along with an outstanding bus architecture to support the addition of extra processing units such as GPGPUs is an ideal platform for developing algorithms for multi-scale problems. The setting of the instrument in the University?s High Performance Computing Research Center will facilitate a cross-disciplinary approach combining expertise in applied mathematics, computer science and domain-specific disciplines enabling innovative approaches for memory intensive applications. The new instrument will play an essential role in educating a new generation of scientists and training students across many disciplines in the use of advanced modeling tools on modern computer platforms, contributing to new graduate student certificate programs offered by PACM, the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics, and PICSciE, the Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering. Finally, the instrument will provide a necessary link between local and national facilities, preparing the Princeton scientific community to the emerging multicore and massively parallel architectures of the future. The instrument will enhance international scientific cooperation by contributing to projects like the Munich-Princeton collaboration in cosmological computational science, and will contribute to science education of the general public through collaboration with the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, with planned new visualizations for use in the Cosmos series and in conjunction with the Museum?s ongoing public education work on earthquakes and geologic movement. Women?s participation in computational projects enabled by the instrument will set examples to encourage greater access of women to science. Finally, access provided to partners at California State University-Northridge will contribute to training minority scientists and engineers.