ACADEMIA
Holland Computing Center Opens a Global Portal in the Peter Kiewit Institute
Through dynamic and forward leaning partnerships, The Peter Kiewit Institute (PKI) will conduct the “virtual” opening of one of the world’s largest and most powerful university-based clusters (supercomputers) at the Holland Computing Center (HCC) on Friday. Invited guests will be in attendance. Recent world rankings by the LINPACK Benchmark’s TOP500 sites released November 2007, listed the HCC in the top 50 supercomputers upon start-up. With over 1,150 nodes utilizing soon to be installed AMD Quad Core Processors, the Holland Computer Center will have over 2,300 processors and 9,200 cores (over 60 Teraflops) and will then be listed among the top 20 largest clusters in the world. 
“We see this as a tremendous opportunity [through the HCC] to advance the research capabilities of the Institute (PKI) to meet the growing and emerging demands of the university community as well as those of our business partners,” said John Callahan, director of technical infrastructure for PKI and co-founder of the HCC. Established in 2007, primarily through a generous grant from the Holland Foundation and American Power Conversion, which donated all of the racks, power, cooling and security equipment for the supercomputing center, the center will be housed on the prestigious campus of the University of Nebraska in the Peter Kiewit Institute. PKI continues to dedicate its focus on the students’ needs for their future by moving to the front-end of enterprise computing with this installation. This was illustrated in a recent Wall Street Journal interview with the IBM Chief Executive Samuel Palmisano and Google CEO Eric Schmidt dated October 8, 2007. Both shared concerns that “computer-science schools were focused on teaching students how to program single servers and not giving them opportunities to learn about parallel programming.” With this installation at HCC, students at PKI will be provided a course of study allowing them hands on learning in enterprise computing studies and a market advantage that many computer-science graduates will not have in today’s job market. The shared vision of this effort resulted in $13.6 million in partnerships involving AMD, APC, Caterpillar, Cisco, Cox Communications, DLR, Dell, First National Bank, Force10, Foundry, Gallup Organization, Kiewit Companies, Merlin Gerin, Microsoft, Mutual of Omaha, Omaha Electric, Panasas, Pipe Benders Local Union, Platform Computing, Power Protection Products, Schneider Electric, SAIC, Siemens, Trane, Tyco Cabling, Union Pacific, University of Nebraska Medical Center, Waldinger, and Webster Design among others. The Center features a 2 Gigabit Cisco Infinaband I/O network and a 1 Gigabit management network provided by Force10 Networks; Holland will also be an early adopter of the new Windows HPC Server 2008, and currently is one of the largest and fastest Microsoft clusters running Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003. This has given PKI the ability to be an incubator and demonstration center for unprecedented opportunities for the nation and globally. The cluster has five primary focus areas: Defense, Life Sciences, Medical, Financial and support to Higher Education Research. The HCC will also be home to the Gallup Organization’s new “World Poll.” Announcements are expected from the University of Nebraska and others regarding partnerships and projects of major consequence to PKI and the Holland Computing Center.
“We see this as a tremendous opportunity [through the HCC] to advance the research capabilities of the Institute (PKI) to meet the growing and emerging demands of the university community as well as those of our business partners,” said John Callahan, director of technical infrastructure for PKI and co-founder of the HCC. Established in 2007, primarily through a generous grant from the Holland Foundation and American Power Conversion, which donated all of the racks, power, cooling and security equipment for the supercomputing center, the center will be housed on the prestigious campus of the University of Nebraska in the Peter Kiewit Institute. PKI continues to dedicate its focus on the students’ needs for their future by moving to the front-end of enterprise computing with this installation. This was illustrated in a recent Wall Street Journal interview with the IBM Chief Executive Samuel Palmisano and Google CEO Eric Schmidt dated October 8, 2007. Both shared concerns that “computer-science schools were focused on teaching students how to program single servers and not giving them opportunities to learn about parallel programming.” With this installation at HCC, students at PKI will be provided a course of study allowing them hands on learning in enterprise computing studies and a market advantage that many computer-science graduates will not have in today’s job market. The shared vision of this effort resulted in $13.6 million in partnerships involving AMD, APC, Caterpillar, Cisco, Cox Communications, DLR, Dell, First National Bank, Force10, Foundry, Gallup Organization, Kiewit Companies, Merlin Gerin, Microsoft, Mutual of Omaha, Omaha Electric, Panasas, Pipe Benders Local Union, Platform Computing, Power Protection Products, Schneider Electric, SAIC, Siemens, Trane, Tyco Cabling, Union Pacific, University of Nebraska Medical Center, Waldinger, and Webster Design among others. The Center features a 2 Gigabit Cisco Infinaband I/O network and a 1 Gigabit management network provided by Force10 Networks; Holland will also be an early adopter of the new Windows HPC Server 2008, and currently is one of the largest and fastest Microsoft clusters running Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003. This has given PKI the ability to be an incubator and demonstration center for unprecedented opportunities for the nation and globally. The cluster has five primary focus areas: Defense, Life Sciences, Medical, Financial and support to Higher Education Research. The HCC will also be home to the Gallup Organization’s new “World Poll.” Announcements are expected from the University of Nebraska and others regarding partnerships and projects of major consequence to PKI and the Holland Computing Center.