Coates (supercomputer)

Last updated

Coates is a supercomputer installed at Purdue University on July 21, 2009. The high-performance computing cluster is operated by Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP), the university's central information technology organization. ITaP also operates clusters named Steele built in 2008, Rossmann built in 2010, and Hansen and Carter built in 2011. Coates was the largest campus supercomputer in the Big Ten outside a national center when built. It was the first native 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GigE) cluster to be ranked in the TOP500 and placed 102nd on the June 2010 list. [1]

Contents

Hardware

The Coates cluster consists of 982 64-bit, 8-core HP Proliant DL165 G5p and 11 64-bit, 16-core HP Proliant DL585 G5 systems using AMD 2380 and AMD 8380 processors with various combinations of 16-128 gigabytes of RAM, 500 GB to 2 terabytes of disk and 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GigE) local to each node. Coates uses Cisco and Chelsio network equipment. [2] The cluster's nodes are arrayed in five logical sub-clusters each with different memory and storage configurations designed to meet the varying needs of the researchers using Coates.

Software

Coates nodes run Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 (RHEL5.6) and use Portable Batch System Professional 10.4.6 (PBSPro 10.4.6) for resource and job management. The cluster also has compilers and scientific programming libraries installed.

Cooling system

Coates has a heat-exchanging cooling system that recycles the hot water for use on the Purdue campus.

Construction

Coates was largely built in less than four hours on July 21, 2009, by a team of more than 200 Purdue computer technicians and volunteers, including volunteers from Indiana University, the University of Iowa, the University of Michigan and Michigan State University. It was the second such "high-tech barn raising" hosted by Purdue to assemble a cluster in a single morning. The process was first used for the Steele cluster in 2008.

Funding

The Coates supercomputer and Purdue's other clusters are part of the Purdue Community Cluster Program, a partnership between ITaP and Purdue faculty. In Purdue's program, a "community" cluster is funded by hardware money from grants, faculty startup packages, institutional funds and other sources. ITaP's Rosen Center for Advanced Computing administers the community clusters and provides user support. Each faculty partner always has ready access to the capacity he or she purchases and potentially to more computing power when the nodes of other investors are idle.

Users

The Purdue departments and schools by which Coates is used vary broadly, including Aeronautics and Astronautics, Agronomy, Biology, Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, Civil Engineering, Communications, Computer Science, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering Technology, Industrial Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Medicinal Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, Physics, the Purdue Terrestrial Observatory and Statistics.

DiaGrid

Unused, or opportunistic, cycles from Coates are made available to the TeraGrid and the Open Science Grid using Condor software. Coates is part of Purdue's distributed computing Condor flock, which is the largest publicly disclosed distributed computing system in the world and the center of DiaGrid, a nearly 43,000-processor Condor-powered distributed computing network for research involving Purdue and partners at nine other campuses.

Naming

The Coates cluster is named for Clarence L. "Ben" Coates, who came to Purdue in 1973 to head the School of Electrical Engineering (now Electrical and Computer Engineering) where, for the next decade, he emphasized computer education and the development of computing facilities. He was a driving force behind the high-performance computing and networking plan that led to the creation of the Engineering Computer Network (ECN) serving all of Purdue’s engineering schools. He also initiated a degree program in computer engineering at Purdue. As a research scientist at the General Electric Research Laboratory in New York, Coates developed five patents involving waveform recognition devices, circuit gates and accumulators on computer chips. The Coates cluster continues Purdue's practice of naming new supercomputers after notable figures in the university's computing history.

Related Research Articles

Supercomputer Extremely powerful computer for its era

A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Since 2017, there are supercomputers which can perform over 1017 FLOPS (a hundred quadrillion FLOPS, 100 petaFLOPS or 100 PFLOPS).

Beowulf cluster

A Beowulf cluster is a computer cluster of what are normally identical, commodity-grade computers networked into a small local area network with libraries and programs installed which allow processing to be shared among them. The result is a high-performance parallel computing cluster from inexpensive personal computer hardware.

InfiniBand High-speed, low-latency computer networking bus used in supercomputing

InfiniBand (IB) is a computer networking communications standard used in high-performance computing that features very high throughput and very low latency. It is used for data interconnect both among and within computers. InfiniBand is also used as either a direct or switched interconnect between servers and storage systems, as well as an interconnect between storage systems. It is designed to be scalable and uses a switched fabric network topology. By 2014, it was the most commonly used interconnect in the TOP500 list of supercomputers, until about 2016.

Quadrics (company)

Quadrics was a supercomputer company formed in 1996 as a joint venture between Alenia Spazio and the technical team from Meiko Scientific. They produced hardware and software for clustering commodity computer systems into massively parallel systems. Their highpoint was in June 2003 when six out of the ten fastest supercomputers in the world were based on Quadrics' interconnect. They officially closed on June 29, 2009.

MareNostrum

MareNostrum is the main supercomputer in the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. It is the most powerful supercomputer in Spain, one of thirteen supercomputers in the Spanish Supercomputing Network and one of the seven supercomputers of the European infrastructure PRACE.

TeraGrid

TeraGrid was an e-Science grid computing infrastructure combining resources at eleven partner sites. The project started in 2001 and operated from 2004 through 2011.

PlayStation 3 cluster

The considerable computing capability of the PlayStation 3's Cell microprocessors has raised interest in using multiple, networked PS3s for various tasks that require affordable high-performance computing.

Steele is a supercomputer that was installed at Purdue University on May 5, 2008. The high-performance computing cluster is operated by Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP), the university's central information technology organization. ITaP also operates clusters named Coates built in 2009, Rossmann built in 2010, and Hansen and Carter built in 2011. Steele was the largest campus supercomputer in the Big Ten outside a national center when built. It ranked 104th on the November 2008 TOP500 Supercomputer Sites list.

Computer cluster Set of computers configured in a distributed computing system

A computer cluster is a set of computers that work together so that they can be viewed as a single system. Unlike grid computers, computer clusters have each node set to perform the same task, controlled and scheduled by software.

The Cray CX1 is a deskside high-performance workstation designed by Cray Inc., based on the x86-64 processor architecture. It was launched on September 16, 2008, and was discontinued in early 2012. It comprises a single chassis blade server design that supports a maximum of eight modular single-width blades, giving up to 96 processor cores. Computational load can be run independently on each blade and/or combined using clustering techniques.

DiaGrid is a large, multicampus distributed research computing network utilizing the HTCondor system and centered at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. In 2012, it included nearly 43,000 processors representing 301 teraflops of computing power. DiaGrid received a Campus Technology Innovators Award from Campus Technology magazine and an IDG InfoWorld 100 Award in 2009 and was employed at the SC09 supercomputing conference in Portland, Ore., to capture nearly 150 days of compute time for science jobs.

Clarence Leroy “Ben” Coates was an American computer scientist and engineer known for his work on waveform recognition devices, circuit gates and accumulators.

QPACE is a massively parallel and scalable supercomputer designed for applications in lattice quantum chromodynamics.

Fabric computing

Fabric computing or unified computing involves constructing a computing fabric consisting of interconnected nodes that look like a weave or a fabric when seen collectively from a distance.

SciNet Consortium Scientific research group between the University of Toronto and local hospitals

SciNet is a consortium of the University of Toronto and affiliated Ontario hospitals. It has received funding from both the federal and provincial government, Faculties at the University of Toronto, and affiliated hospitals.

Brutus is the central high-performance cluster of ETH Zurich. It was introduced to the public in May 2008. A new computing cluster called EULER has been announced and opened to the public in May 2014.

Supercomputing in Japan Overview of supercomputing in Japan

Japan operates a number of centers for supercomputing which hold world records in speed, with the K computer becoming the world's fastest in June 2011. and Fugaku took the lead in June 2020, and furthered it, as of November 2020, to 3 times faster than number two computer.

Carter is a supercomputer installed at Purdue University in the fall of 2011 in a partnership with Intel. The high-performance computing cluster is operated by Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP), the university's central information technology organization. ITaP also operates clusters named Steele built in 2008, Coates built in 2009, Rossmann built in 2010, and Hansen built in the summer of 2011. Carter was the fastest campus supercomputer in the U.S. outside a national center when built. It was one of the first clusters to employ Intel's second generation Xenon E-5 "Sandy Bridge" processor and ranked 54th on the November 2011 TOP500 list, making it Purdue's first Top 100-ranked research computing system.

Rossmann is a supercomputer at Purdue University that went into production September 1, 2010. The high-performance computing cluster is operated by Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP), the university's central information technology organization. ITaP also operates clusters named Steele built in 2008, Coates built in 2009, Hansen built in the summer of 2011 and Carter built in the fall of 2012 in partnership with Intel. Rossmann ranked 126 on the November 2010 TOP500 list.

The Holland Computing Center, often abbreviated HCC, is the high-performance computing core for the University of Nebraska System. HCC has locations in both the University of Nebraska-Lincoln June and Paul Schorr III Center for Computer Science & Engineering and the University of Nebraska Omaha Peter Kiewit Institute. The center was named after Omaha businessman Richard Holland who donated considerably to the university for the project.

References

Citations

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.