SCIENCE

Have you heard the buzz? There’s a new "Queen Bee" in Baton Rouge, but this bee won’t be making speeches or signing any bills into law. What Queen Bee is expected to do, however, is vault Louisiana into the world’s upper echelons of supercomputing research capacity. Queen Bee is of course Louisiana’s new 50-teraflop supercomputer, recently acquired to enhance the combined supercomputing capacity of Louisiana’s research universities (linked via LONI, the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative). Now that Queen Bee is up and running at the state’s Information Services Building in downtown Baton Rouge, Louisiana is expected to weigh in this year in the top 25 on the worldwide Top 500 supercomputing capacity list. Queen Bee will put Louisiana in the company of such research powerhouses as the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories and Harvard University. Moreover, once Queen Bee is connected to the state’s other LONI supercomputers, Louisiana’s statewide research supercomputing capacity will stand at 100 teraflops, a massive level of processing power by any standard. "This is a watershed moment; Louisiana has joined the ranks of the world’s supercomputing elite, said LONI Executive Director Charles McMahon. “Queen Bee’s addition to the broader array of connected high performance computing resources through LONI marks our state’s arrival as an IT powerhouse.” The name “Queen Bee” is a reference to the nickname Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco was tagged with early in her administration by a legislator who was displeased about losing a valued committee chairmanship. The Governor good-naturedly adopted the moniker as a symbol for her administration. In honor of Governor Blanco’s strong support of Louisiana’s information technology infrastructure (including a $40 million, ten-year commitment to LONI), the LONI Management Council unanimously agreed that the new “statewide” machine should be known as Queen Bee. Benchmarking performance tests indicate that Queen Bee will operate at approximately 70% of her 50-teraflop capacity, a fairly typical efficiency level for a machine with such a high The Board of Regents is an Equal Opportunity and ADA Employer rated capacity, and, again, sufficient to warrant the expectation of making the top 25 on this year’s worldwide supercomputer rankings. “The circuits of supercomputers like Queen Bee are commonly characterized as being ‘massively parallel,’” said Steve Landry, Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of Louisiana –– Lafayette and a member of the LONI Management Council. “The way I have explained this phenomenon in the classroom is to compare the situation to fifty men trying to move a 5000-pound slab of granite. Even if each man could individually push a 100-pound slab, when all of them try to work together to push the larger slab, there are some obvious practical issues –– limited physical space for each man to get his shoulder against the stone, for example – that make it impossible to get full efficiency from all fifty men at the same time. It’s an analogous situation when parallel computer circuits are working on the same problem.” Getting Queen Bee installed and operational in time to be considered for this year’s Top 500 list took both hard work and a little luck. At about the time the supercomputer became available to the state, Louisiana’s Information Services Building was already undergoing a electrical system upgrade to improve reliability. “Since the upgraded control capacity was already going to be in place, [Louisiana Chief Information Officer] Rizwan Ahmed saw the opportunity to amend the facility upgrade contract to accommodate the needs of the new computer,” said Randy Walker, Information Technology Director for the Louisiana Division of Administration. “We just took a nine-month detour on the facility upgrade to get it ready for Queen Bee.” Walker said that one of the biggest challenges in getting Queen Bee installed was providing adequate cooling, which had to be provided initially by portable chillers until the air conditioning upgrades could be completed. Another bump in the road as the OIS team worked against the clock was negotiating around a provision in the contract with Dell (the manufacturer of Queen Bee) which tied the delivery of specific components to the degree of completion of the ISB upgrade. “We worked until 2:00 in the morning for five or six days in a row,” Walker said, “but with teamwork and some valuable help from the Dell folks, we were able to achieve our goal. This project it great for Louisiana, and I’m proud to be able to say that I played at least a small part in seeing it through to completion.” The 2007 Top500 Supercomputer Sites rankings will be announced on June 27.