PHYSICS

TORONTO -- Extending its leadership in HPC solutions, Platform Computing today announced that the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, a world-class scientific research facility, has increased the size of its Platform LSF deployment to 1,600 CPUs. With a new high performance, Grid-enabled architecture, LSF 5 is the foundation of Platform's Grid computing solutions, empowering enterprises to harness the untapped processing power of globally distributed, heterogeneous computing resources. Brookhaven is using Platform LSF to enable physicists from around the world to access and analyze terabytes of data collected from experiments conducted at its Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). A Platform customer for the past four years, Brookhaven recently expanded its Linux farm to 840 dual-CPU rack-mounted servers operating on Intel Pentium architecture. Brookhaven had already deployed Platform LSF on more than 800 CPUs, and is currently in the process of adding another 800 CPUs. "Brookhaven's Linux farm provides the computing resources for a large community of physicists conducting research into high energy nuclear and particle physics," said Ofer Rind, a physicist at Brookhaven. "Platform LSF is a reliable solution that enables our scientific community to analyze data in an efficient and controlled manner, while ensuring maximum productivity in the use of limited shared resources. By providing on-demand access to available compute resources and balancing the workload to ensure fair-sharing of resources, Platform will enable us to derive valuable knowledge from this intensive research in a short period of time." RHIC, the world's biggest particle accelerator for studies in nuclear physics, aims to recreate the conditions of the early universe to gain insights into the fundamental state of matter that existed millionths of a second after the 'Big Bang,' when the universe was first formed. The collider creates head-on, subatomic collisions between ions of gold atoms (gold nuclei that have been stripped of their electrons). Each collision emits thousands of particles, and sophisticated detectors gather and decipher the enormous volume of data that is recorded about the properties of these particles. The data is continuously streamed at very high rates into a massive storage facility, which currently houses approximately 300 terabytes of data. Once the data has been reduced into smaller, or reconstructed, data files, a community of over 1,000 physicists from around the globe utilizes Platform LSF to harness the processing power of Brookhaven's Linux farm to analyze the data. In an effort to maximize the processing potential of the compute farms at the four high energy physics labs in the U.S., each will participate in common Grid test beds in which Platform LSF will be deployed as one of several local job managers. Since LSF is based on an open architecture, it will plug into Brookhaven's Globus Grid environment to enable seamless Grid Computing. Brookhaven is also developing and deploying a major computing facility for the ATLAS experiment, which is one of four facilities to be located at a powerful accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, which is now under construction at CERN. Platform LSF is being used as the primary job manager on the ATLAS Linux farm, and will manage jobs submitted remotely via the research Grid. "Platform has been providing its signature workload management solutions to world-renowned high energy physics labs for the past ten years, and continues to play an integral role in applied and fundamental research," said Rene' Copeland, vice president, government and life sciences, Platform. "Platform LSF has the ability to support and optimize the performance of widely distributed, large-scale computing environments, such as Brookhaven's." In addition to Brookhaven, Platform LSF is in the esteemed position of being deployed by three other DOE high energy physics laboratories in the U.S., as well as The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the world's largest particle physics center, based in Geneva, Switzerland. The other North American laboratories are Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, and Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Each of these facilities utilizes Platform LSF to provide scientists and physicists with on demand access to shared computing resources and research data.