Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Cost-Conscious Supercomputing

The Science

Harnessing ‘Big Science’

The supercomputer, which was constructed exclusively of off-the-shelf technologies from Apple and other partners, will significantly enhance the university’s research capabilities. “Virginia Tech’s idea was to develop a supercomputer of national prominence, based upon a homegrown cluster,” says Dean Aref, who is also a former chief scientist at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Adds Varadarajan, “Expect to see a lot more Power Mac G5 clusters in the future.”

Supercomputing, or terascale computing, is mandated by the need to solve problems too large for an individual computer. The need for this computing power arises often in almost every field of study that uses quantitative methods.

In the past, these fields have relied on a combination of theory and experiment. But now, computational science allows researchers to simulate the behavior of natural or human-engineered systems, instead of merely observing a system or building a physical model of it. This powerful approach enables glimpses into places that are too small, too large, too dangerous, too short-lived, or too long lasting for typical experiments.

Obtaining information about the galaxy, global warming, computational biology, drug design, and homeland security are just a few of the grand challenges that computational scientists can address through supercomputing. The Virginia Tech supercomputer also will serve such purposes as nanoscale electronics, quantum chemistry, computational chemistry and biochemistry, aerodynamics through multidisciplinary design optimization, molecular statics, cell cycle modeling, and computational acoustics. Enabled in part by the versatility of the G5 processor, the cluster is truly an interdisciplinary tool.

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