Not long after I wrote my post, “Big Red” - The World’s Fastest University Supercomputer, I received an e-mail from one of the system administrators of Big Red. We have been communicating via e-mail the past two days. I have new pics, more information on the expansion, answers to a few questions I got in the comments, like, “Can Big Red play Doom 3 or Crysis?”, and a estimate of Big Red’s new ranking on the supercomputer list. (The questions are at the bottom of the post.)

Instead of trying to reword the e-mails, I’ll just copy and paste:

IBM donated 526 nodes plus all the supporting equipment to be equally shared by IU and Purdue to support the IEDC (http://www.in.gov/iedc/) Corporation. Basically, commercial companies in Indiana will be able to use these nodes to run jobs.

The nodes are exactly like the old nodes. So, essentially we have doubled the size of BigRed. Keep in mind that IU only owns 3/4 of the new machine (768 compute nodes) and Purdue owns the other 1/4 (256 compute nodes). We have finished standing up the new nodes, but are still in a testing phase before we actually put those nodes in production.

In the comments of the first Big Red post someone pointed my attention to the Texas Advanced Computing Center and their university-owned supercomputer, aptly named “Lonestar”.

Also, we are not going to get ahead of Lonestar. They have more
processors than even the expanded BigRed - 5200 compared to 4096. And,
due to the Top500 rules, since Purdue owns 1/4 of it, we can only report
3/4 of the processors when we submit to the top500 list. So, BigRed owned
by IU won’t even come close to Lonestar…

By only including 3/4 of the new expansion, Big Red should be able to top 30 Teraflops. In the latest rankings of the Top 500 supercomputers that would put Big Red around 15 in the world, and second or third when speaking strictly of university-owned supercomputers.

If you include the entire cluster, it would be a solid second, just behind Lonestar.

For all of you that complained about my pics, here are some new ones, graciously provided to me by a friend. Click on them to see the full size view.

Check out that backend!

Gotta love fiber (optics)!

Lots of Big Ass computers.

A few questions for the admin, jemmille style. See my other interviews here.

1) When someone, say a researcher, wants to interface with the computer, how
does one go about doing that? Is it all text/command-line based?

You create a job submission script and submit your script to the resource
manager. BigRed uses IBM’s resource manager called LoadLeveler. You can
find more information about LoadLeveler at
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/clresctr/vxrx/index.jsp.

2) What types of information does the computer process? I realize it could
be almost anything but do you have a few examples…maybe something it is
working on now?

We do a lot of NAMD runs (http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/namd/) and we
run a lot of BLAST jobs (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/BLAST/). We are also
part of the LEAD project which deals with weather forecasting
(https://portal.leadproject.org/gridsphere/gridsphere). Of course, we
runs lots of different software with more being installed all the time.

3) I realize supercomputers are not meant for gaming purposes but a lot of
people see that type of speed and think, “Holy shit that would be awesome
for Quake 4, Doom 3, etc. I assume the graphics capabilities of the server
are quite limited but for all those I would like to silence, I mean, that
are interested, could you tell me : Could you? If not, why? Anything else
about this topic.

There are no graphics capabilities on BigRed. You wouldn’t want to run
your game on BigRed. You’d want to run it on an HP 9400 with a 16-lane
PCI-e bus and a latest-model NVIDIA card capable of running OpenGL v3.0.
But that’s just me.

4) Do you admin’s ever “play” with Big Red… you know just do things
because you are admin’s and you can harness the power of one of the most
powerful computers in the world?

There’s really nothing to play with. We don’t have parallel software that
we want to run. I might be interested in running some AI simulations on
it at some point in the future, but for the most part, this is a job for
me.

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