Supercomputer Center Fosters Cooperation

Scientists say launching Of the Hawaiian facilityis also a major step in restructuring of U.S.defense research efforts Scientists and government officials expect a recently launched United States Air Force supercomputer center in Hawaii--equipped with one of the world's most powerful parallel-processing computers, one of only two of its kind anywhere--to forge far-reaching collaborations among academic, industry, and government scientists, many of whom have contributed to its creation. They say the $21 million Maui High-Performance Computing Center (MHPCC), which officially became operational in August, represents a major step in retooling Department of Defense (DoD) research to foster increased U.S. global economic competitiveness. In addition to aiding advances in biomedicine, education, environmental science, geoscience, and other areas, the new center is expected to become a vital communications link between researchers in the U.S. and other parts of the world--especially in Asia. At the heart of the United States Air Force's Maui High-Performance Computing Center (MHPCC) in Hawaii lies a supercomputer called the IBM POWERparallel System, also known as the SP2. This is a scalable parallel-processing computer--a machine that, to solve a computational problem, divides it among many processors that run simultaneously. The Maui center's computer has 400 nodes, or processors, in place, making it one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, according to MHPCC researchers. "We're at the moment only one of two supercomputer centers with an IBM POWERparallel System installed," says Margaret Williams, associate director of the center. The Cornell Theory Center, a National Supercomputing Center at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., is the other; Cornell scientists soon expect to bring its capacity up to 512 processors. "What parallel systems let you do is essentially put all the [processors] together and manage them effectively as one system," explains Irving Wladawsky-Berger, general manager for IBM POWER Parallel Systems in Somers, N.Y., IBM's parallel computer branch. "By being able to put it together, you have N times the processing or storage capability, where N is the number of processors." It's the speed at which computing can be accomplished that makes IBM's SP2 a giant among supercomputers. The SP2 "has a microprocessor that's about twice as fast as the previous one," says Wladawsky-Berger of SP2's predecessor--the SP1. "I've worked on the SP1 since last January, and the SP2 is almost twice as fast, even when many users are on it," notes Brad Smith, an Air Force captain and one of the first to test the center's computing power. "We did some very large simulations, and it took us a few days to run them at the Maui site. It felt like a lot of time, but it took us a few weeks to do similar things on some ofthe older supercomputers." Computer scientists use a unit called the flop, or floating-point (arithmetic) operation per second, to compare the rate at which computers solve problems. A personal computer with a 486 microprocessor, for example, typically runs at 2 million to 4 million flops, or 2 to 4 megaflops. SP2's capacity, on the other hand, is 50,000 times that of some 486s. "We will have a machine with 100 billion [flops]. I would say there are currently a half-dozen or fewer such machines in existence," notes Frank Gilfeather, a professor of mathematics at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and a co-principal investigator at the center. "The national goal is that the United States will reach the teraflop level by the turn of the century. A teraflop is a trillion flops, and we're one-tenth of the way with this machine. "You need a machine that has that size to do things like weather prediction, molecular modeling to develop new drugs, and computational fluid dynamics to model a whole airplane in flight. Currently we can only do pieces at a time, and fairly slowly." --K.Y.K. The Scientist, Vol:8, #21, p.6, October 31, 1994 "The Air Force's role is changing and the new role is to help U.S. business become stronger," says computer scientist Ronald Comeau, an Air Force captain and program manager at the Maui Center. "The partnership really is a simplistic idea, and we're running this experiment to see how well it works. In the long run we think it will benefit the country." The center--a 24,500-square-foot facility with 25 employees--is located in Kihei on the Hawaiian island of Maui. MHPCC's primary function is to support DoD research for the Air Force Maui Optical Station--telescopes atop Mount Haleakala on Maui. Its secondary, but highly significant, aim is the development of related computing technology for the benefit of other government agencies, educational institutes, and industry. This month, it was made more widely available to researchers, mostly through expanded Internet access. Currently, more than 500 investigators from around the world are tapping into the center's computing and image-processing capabilities. MHPCC was established through a special nationwide call for proposals to U.S. universities from DoD. In September 1993, the University of New Mexico (UNM), Albuquerque, was awarded a contract from DoD's Phillips Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base, N.Mex., to set up and manage the facility. In addition to DoD and UNM, a team of "partners" from business and academia with expertise in scientific and engineering research, administration, and software development are collaborating on center projects. Somers, N.Y.-based IBM POWER Parallel Systems is one of the main partners, outfitting the center with its latest parallel-processing supercomputer (see accompanying story). Other major partners include the Carnegie Mellon University Imaging Group, Pittsburgh, and SETS Technology Inc. of Mililani, Hawaii, a company specializing in remote sensing and data processing. Current and potential applications for the center's resources span an array of disciplines, say the Maui center collaborators. Biomedicine is one realm in which the center will facilitate joint ventures between industry and academia, according to Irving Wladawsky-Berger, general manager at IBM POWER Parallel Systems. As yet, no formal arrangements have been established with biomedical companies; however, several projects are in discussion. "One of the main uses of parallel supercomputing has been computational chemistry, which means doing lots and lots of computing to look at the properties of different molecules," says Wladawsky-Berger. "The pharmaceutical industry has been very interested in using supercomputers so they can understand the properties of different drugs." Another application Wladaw-sky-Berger thinks pharmaceutical firms will jump at is using supercomputers to efficiently store and access the massive amount of data that is generated in the research phase of drug development. "For every drug that gets to market," he notes, "typically pharmaceutical companies have tested hundreds, if not thousands, of drugs that didn't make it." He says scientists would like to access information from previous experiments rather than having to repeat tests. "So having gigantic databases available and then having various efficient searching mechanisms is something they're very interested in," Wladawsky-Berger maintains. "Parallel computers are excellent for that both because of their ability to store gigantic amounts of data and their ability to search that data very fast." Scientists need a powerful computer to pick up the subtle interactions of the drugs they're testing, he says: "Think of it as having a powerful pair of glasses. The more powerful the glasses, the more you can see faint things." An exchange of technology between DoD and the biomedical community would be mutually beneficial, Comeau contends. "The same technology that we use to process images that come off [DoD] telescopes can be used in medical imaging," he explains. And if by using the facilities of the center, the medical community can develop faster ways of processing images, he says, "then we can also use those faster ways to process images from our telescopes." One of the first researchers to go online at the center was Brad Smith, an Air Force captain and space warfare simulation officer who is trained in computer engineering. "We're interested in how the space-debris environment affects our spacecraft," he reports. "There's a lot of junk floating around up there." Smith explains that the Phillips Laboratory has a cooperative agreement with Teladesic Corp., a Kirkland, Wash.-based telecommunications company, to help plan the deployment of 840 low-Earth-orbit satellites as part of improvements to the U.S. telecommunications infrastructure. "We're very concerned about what will happen when they put up these satellites in essentially the same orbit" as other satellites and spacecraft, he notes. The main focus of his research, he says, is to simulate what will happen if these orbiting bodies collide. This work entails running data-intensive simulations of a satellite breakup, for example. "We then take the output in the form of various dump files and view it on graphics workstations," Smith ex-plains. Researchers as-sociated with the center say that its location is paramount to achieving some of its goals. "I like to think of it as the center of the world information superhighway in the Pacific. It [will be] a key link in bridging the Far East high-tech centers to the technology centers on the mainland U.S.," declares Frank Gilfeather, a professor of mathematics at New Mexico who, along with UNM colleagues Brian Smith, a professor of computer science, and John S. Sobolewski, a professor of electrical engineering, are co-principal investigators at the Maui Center. Half of that link with the world information network is made through an advanced fiber-optic connection from the Hawaiian island of Oahu to the Internet backbone in Los Angeles. The transmission capacity of this link--45 million bits per second--is greater than any current connection between the U.S. and Europe. Researchers who need to solve computational problems or work with images that require great computing speed and memory are able to tap directly into the resources of the center through this high-speed link. Smith explains that, currently, for the center to connect to users in Asia, "we have to go from Maui back to the mainland and then back to the Far East" via standard telephone lines, not fiber optics. "So what we're very much trying to encourage and create is a conductivity [telecommunications link] that is direct and more reliable, robust, and faster than what we're currently working with." Smith says the center's collaborators are hoping to parlay the high-speed, fiber-optic link already in place into an additional direct, fiber-optic connection between Hawaii and the Far East to be built by one or more Pacific Rim countries in the near future. "As we create more and more demand for it by having more and more organizations use the center, that will come along," he predicts. The center is currently negotiating with IBM Asia Pacific Inc. to become one of its major users in the Far East. "IBM Asia Pacific--as one of the users of the center--would go around and say to whoever's funding it from their side: 'Wouldn't it be great if we had this conductivity?' And we at the center are going to create more and more of those subtle pressures to get that created." Smith explains that one of the reasons that the second leg of the entire U.S.-Far East connection is so necessary is that not all access to the Internet is equal. "Internet is everywhere in the U.S. and in some sense around the world, but its qualities are very, very different, depending on where you are," he says. The center is also proposing to upgrade the technology of its link to the Maui Optical Station telescopes from its current microwave transmission to high-speed fiber optics. Through these same telecommunication networks the center will also help bring novel science-education experiences to U.S. schools. "We will establish links to many schools so they will havehigh-speed data links directly to an off-ramp of the information highway," says Gilfeather. The center's high-capacity, fiber-optic connection will allow students in the continental U.S., as well as on the Hawaiian islands, to take advantage of the capabilities of Maui's supercomputer. Using this technology, the center is also working with the Navajo Nation to bring supercomputing experiences to native Americans. "We are bringing to the state of Hawaii a node of the Jason Project," says Gilfeather. Jason is the name of a remote-controlled submarine used in deep-sea exploration, and the Jason Project is an annual deep-sea expedition televised live to hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren in North America and Europe (F. Golden, The Scientist, May 15, 1989, page 1). The Jason Project will soon be exploring an underground volcano that is in the process of forming a new island in the Hawaiian chain, and, via the Maui Center link, Hawaiian students will be able to see the volcanic activity firsthand, Gilfeather says. DoD investigators anticipate that, by combining resources and talent with academic and industry researchers in the private sector, the center will improve the computing capabilities of all parties involved. Comeau sums up the payoff for DoD and the research community: "Hopefully, what businesses will contribute is that they'll help develop software that DoD [and others] can use with their own research. We're hoping that we'll get a lot of public domain software out of this." Another distinctive feature of the center, according to officials, is its arrangement for information sharing. Software companies and other firms that use the center will be allowed to retain rights to their developments. "To our knowledge this is the first center where the government and a university--as the manager of the center--have both agreed to waive all intellectual rights to work brought to the center by a third party," says Gilfeather. For more information, contact the Maui High-Performance Computing Center, 550 Lipoa Pkwy., Kihei, Hawaii 96753; (808) 879-5077. Fax: (808) 879-5018. E-mail: info@mail.mhpcc.edu.

Supercomputer Center Fosters Cooperation

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