APPLICATIONS

On October 6 at noon the College of Engineering introduced its new Microway Supercomputer, called Cyclops, to the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus in the Gunness Student Center. The $120,000 HPC Linux Cluster was recently purchased by Dean Michael Malone of the College of Engineering. It was purchased to facilitate undergraduate research projects that require supercomputing capability, to provide a resource for graduate courses in computational science, and to enable new faculty with computational interests to initiate their research agenda before they obtain dedicated equipment for their own labs. Cyclops has 608 processor cores, densely packaged in 38 1U chassis. They house a total of 152 quad core AMD Opteron processors and 300 GBytes of DRAM, interconnected via dual Gigabit Ethernet links. Each of the 608 processor cores on Cyclops can perform about 5 billion math operations per second (5 GFLOPS). Since it takes roughly three seconds for a human to perform a large addition or multiplication operation, each processor on this machine has at least the computational capacity of all the humans in the world working together. “Computers are changing every aspect of how engineering is being performed today,” says Blair Perot, Director of the Theoretical and Computational Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering. “And this forward thinking investment by Dean Malone keeps UMass Amherst at the leading edge of engineering research and education.” “The 608 processor cores in Cyclops provide us with the paradigm-changing ability to solve horrendously complex equation systems,” says Dr. Perot. “For example, this computer could be used to calculate (via Newton’s first principal of motion) how much air will move through a jet engine by solving an equation system with roughly 100-million unknowns. In civil engineering a similar calculation might track the motion of all the molecules near a small crack in the concrete of a bridge in order to calculate the crack's growth speed and direction and therefore predict the time it will take before bridge failure occurs.” UMass Amherst awarded the Cyclops contract to Microway based on its innovative high- density design, superior performance and compelling price. A woman-owned small business based in Plymouth, Massachusetts, the company lists its mission as “providing customers with leading edge technologies for high performance computing solutions.” Microway, a Massachusetts Higher Education Consortium (MHEC) supplier, is one of Massachusetts’ oldest computer manufacturers, incorporated in 1982. The company started its high performance computing efforts by developing software for the Intel 8087 coprocessor in the IBM PC. Today, Microway has earned a wide-reaching influence over a vast and dynamic international marketplace based on it’s reputation for expertise in design and manufacture of high density Linux clusters, workstations and InfiniBand network solutions. For more information on Microway, visit www.microway.com.