Supercomputer, super feats

IU is home to one of the largest supercomputers in the U.S. In June, it was listed No. 78 on the list of the top 500 supercomputers in the world. \nThe IBM SP, unveiled in October of 2001, can perform up to a trillion mathematical calculations per second. \n"The list is one measure that signals to potential users of IU's system that IU's IBM SP is in the top segment of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, a fact made more notable by the fact that this computer is also the nation's largest university-owned supercomputer," said Jan Holloway, who works in the Communications and Planning Office for University Information and Technology Services. "These facts continue to put IU on the map as a super-computing powerhouse."\nThe list looks at the number of systems installed, the computers' locations and how they are used. This information is compiled via questionnaires given to high-performance computer experts, manufacturers, computational scientists and the Internet community, Holloway said.\nEvery six months the top 500 list is recompiled. The IBM SP slipped slightly from its position of No. 50 in November. \n"Institutions are continually making changes to and upgrading their technology resources … the rankings on the list naturally shuffle," Holloway said. "The fact that IU is in the same general rankings neighborhood suggests our Research SP is holding fairly steady in the rankings game."\nThe IBM SP comprises two separate research systems, which together are called the Research SP. The Aries complex is located on the Bloomington campus; it's the machine that received the ranking on the top 500 list. The Orion complex is located at IU-Purdue University in Indianapolis. Even though the computers are in two different places, they both can be accessed at any IU campus.\nThe powerful computer allows for researchers to calculate in weeks what might have taken years on a personal computer. The supercomputer is used for research in biology, chemistry, earth sciences and archaeology, to name a few. It is also key to the Indiana Genomics Initiative, or INGEN, which combines the IU School of Medicine, biology and chemistry programs and high-performance computing to study the human genome.\nSteven Gottlieb, a physics professor and elementary particle theorist, uses the IBM SP to calculate how quarks bind together. \n"I am particularly interested now in states that contain a heavy quark called a 'b,' or 'bottom quark,'" Gottlieb said. "I have been using the SP to understand how these states decay."\nGottlieb said while the IBM SP is not the most powerful computer he has ever used in his research, he has been able to get a lot of work done on it because it gives him more freedom to decide what he wants to calculate.\n"At the national computer centers we propose a year in advance what we will calculate. Right now, I am running some small test jobs on the SP that were not proposed last year," Gottlieb said. "I am very glad that I was just able to start these jobs and run them for a couple of weeks to see how interesting the results are."\nIU and Purdue University are currently working together to link their supercomputers to form the Indiana Virtual Machine Room. The computers will be linked over I-Light, a high-performance, optical fiber network, and will allow the computers to perform over a trillion operations per second.\n"To combine the facilities of both universities really puts the state at the forefront of advanced information technology development," said Craig Stewart, director of research and academic computing at IU. "This will be tremendously important for research in the state and that, in turn, should lead to important economic development"