This makes way for a newer, faster supercomputing cluster to reside under the roof of the IU Data ?Center.
Karst, the new supercomputer developed for IU, is a high throughput computer.
Matt Link, director of research technology systems at University Information Technology Services, said this means Karst is able to do many small jobs quickly.
Link said Karst operates by taking a larger problem and breaking it down into pieces that individual processors are assigned to resolve, similar to a processor on a regular computer. Processors are the computational “brains” in a ?computer, Link said.
“(The processors) all work on it together,” Link said. “Then, when they all get their parts done, they gather back and you get a result.”
This allows the supercomputer to solve problems at a faster rate than a normal computer with only a single processor.
The supercomputer can perform simulations to abate the possible outcomes of a problem. This is especially helpful in research involving hard science, such as observing how two ?chemicals react.
Researchers can simulate reactions using Karst to find which ones were active and focus on those. Link said the supercomputing technology at IU has minimized researchers’ processes from years to months.
“Our job is supporting researchers and expediting their time to science,” he said.
Hancock said the presence of Karst at IU is advantageous to researchers by providing a way to “leverage the investment” of a ?research grant.
In applying for a grant, researchers at IU do not need to request funding for supercomputer time because that resource is already provided on campus. According to the IT News and Events website, researchers that used Quarry in their work altogether accumulated $365,419,648 total in grants.
Hancock predicted Karst would accumulate at least as many funds as Quarry, if not more.
Anyone at IU is able to create an account on Karst by creating an IT account on www.kb.indiana.edu .
“It’s really a push of ours to try to use these resources and make them available and productive for a wide audience,” Hancock said.
Additionally, individual departments can purchase nodes within the system to access their own resources for research purposes.
A node of Karst is equivalent to a server, and each node has two processors with eight cores each. Karst is equipped with 256 compute nodes and 16 dedicated data nodes, according to the UITS Knowledge Base ?website.
Link said the supercomputer could perform text-based analysis as well, so it is not limited to hard science-based research. According to the IT News and Events website, the supercomputer Quarry has performed 6,362,872 jobs.
Karst is four to five times more powerful than Quarry and is expected to do four to five times the capacity of work.
The process of developing Karst for IU lasts six to 18 months.
Hancock said this process includes allocating the funds for the new technology and composing internal proposals that state why the new technology is ?necessary.
From there, the team sends a request for proposals to vendors and conducts meetings with the respondents to eventually decide what kind of system is ?needed.
As the senior manager, Hancock spearheaded the proposal-writing process.
Link’s role involves the operation of Karst, ensuring the supercomputer works properly and that it will aptly replace Quarry. After the installation, Link said the vendor runs stability and performance testing.
Once the system is through testing and accepted, the research technology division will build the applications from Quarry on Karst so that “when Karst goes online, it’ll be ready to go,” Link said.
As of Oct. 21, IBM, the vendor of Karst, is just finishing stability testing. Karst is set to go online in ?November.