, Georgia Institute of Technology
Abstract:
While NT is a relatively new environment for the College of Computing, there is already a wide variety of research in the planning stages which will be implemented on the NT platform as a result of Microsoft granting the College a source license. Work will include such areas as networking, multimedia, educational technology, future computing environments, graphics/visualization/usability, immersive/VR environments, and distributed parallel processing.
The largest scale project will be an Intel-funded extension to some of the work already in progress on our NSF-sponsored research infrastructure grant, which is concerned with creating distributed laboratories that combine:
- innovative high-performance computation
- advanced technologies for real-time user interaction, rendering, and visualization of ongoing complex simulations
- a geographically distributed collaborative community of scientific and engineering end-users working on computationally demanding real-world problems, enabled to interact with each other and their experiments in multimedia settings which resemble the laboratory environments with which they are familiar
Initially, the computational resources supplied by the Intel-sponsored extension will consist of two large-scale computational clusters, each consisting of 25+ quad-PentiumPro nodes, thereby representing future computing infrastructures comprised of both SMP and distributed memory machines. These clusters will be richly connected via a networking infrastructure providing multiple, low-latency interconnects within clusters and high-bandwidth networking between clusters. MPI will be used as the parallel computing environment, with one cluster initially utilizing Solaris x86 on each node and the other cluster utilizing NT. Once our existing middleware, customized network device drivers, selected applications, etc., have been successfully ported to the NT operating system, programming environment, and tools, both clusters will utilize NT.
Interactive machines consisting of Intel dual-processors with multimedia teleconferencing capabilities and high-end 3D graphics, some also with immersive interfaces, will be connected into the same high-bandwidth networking fabric, providing the user-visible interfaces to the distributed laboratory applications. Much like the computational clusters, some of these systems will initially utilize Solaris x86 and some NT, with the intention of converting entirely to NT when existing applications and middleware have been ported.
This Intel equipment will interoperate with the existing infrastructure purchased through the NSF grant and other sources, including two computational clusters consisting of uni-, dual-, and quad- processor UNIX workstations as nodes (Sun and SGI), several SGI Power Challenge and Origin 2000 multiprocessors, a small Cray, an IBM SP-2, and several laboratories of UNIX workstations from Sun, SGI, and IBM that serve as the current user interface machines.
Pam Buffington
College of Computing : Georgia Institute of Technology
pam@cc.gatech.edu
College of Computing
801 Atlantic Drive.
Atlanta GA 30332-0280
Ph: 404-894-4796
Fx: 404-894-9826