ENGINEERING

Alphawest announced the deployment of a high performance Grid compute solution at The University of Queensland (UQ) as part of the establishment of the Queensland Hypersonic Testing Facility. The solution, consisting of 66 Sun Microsystems Sun Fire V20z Dual Opteron Servers, is being deployed as part of UQ's Computational Molecular Science cluster supercomputing facility to complement the existing 128 nodes Sun Xeon server-based Grid. It will be part of the University's ongoing research, with support from the Queensland Government's Smart State Research Facilities fund, into future space technology concepts such as SCRAMjet propulsion and aerocapture. With a history in hypersonic aerodynamics research spanning 20 years, the University's Center for Hypersonics provides international leadership in the ongoing development of hypervelocity test facilities, SCRAMjet propulsion and Rocket flight-testing. This was demonstrated by the University's completion of the first successful flight of a SCRAMjet vehicle in 2002 that reached speeds of Mach 7. UQ researchers are also part of an international project to fly the world's fastest air-breathing engine -- targeting a speed of Mach 10 in 2005. Specific applications of the new cluster facility include the simulation of rarefied gas-dynamic flows, inlet and combustor design calculations for SCRAMjet vehicles, and optimization of shock-tunnel nozzle profiles. Current work that involves very large-scale computation includes the modeling of the extreme aero-thermodynamic environments experienced by re-entry spacecraft and the estimation of operating conditions for the superorbital expansion tubes that are operated by the Hypersonics group. Detailed molecular simulations of reactive processes will also be carried out to validate and improve the chemical models utilized in current generation Hypersonics simulation codes. Mark Towers, Alphawest national manager for education, said, "Alphawest is proud to provide this solution to the University of Queensland to help support their world-leading research and development into future space technology which has already received significant levels of international recognition." "The deployment of this solution further demonstrates the capability of the Sun Opteron platform to provide an excellent high performance Grid compute solution. With its support for multiple operating systems, 32 bit and 64 bit architectures, Sun's Opteron family of products are increasingly delivering significant benefits to our clients nationally," Towers concluded. Andrew Boulus, national manager of education and research for Sun Microsystems, said, "The deployment by The University of Queensland of this Opteron based Grid, when combined with its existing Sun Microsystems Xeon based Grid provides one of Australia's leading High Performance Computing (HPC) platforms." "Grid computing is a major area of commitment by Sun, and the selection of this solution to support such leading edge research being undertaken by The University of Queensland support our commitment to this area," said Boulus.