Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES) at the University of Texas
Researchers See the Keys to the Future with Sun Fire ServersThe Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences was created at the University of Texas at Austin to provide the infrastructure and intellectual leadership for strong interdisciplinary programs in computational engineering and sciences. The Institute is now the home of ten research centers in computational engineering and computational science and four active research groups. It manages a distinguished PhD program in Computational and Applied Mathematics and a highly competitive postdoctoral fellowship program. Customer Challenges
SolutionSun Fire servers are clustered to provide the highly available computational power required to drive a real-time visualization solution. Built to facilitate high-speed communication between devices, the cluster also uses grid technologies so that ICES administrators can easily manage jobs, resources, and data. Business Results
Story DetailsAt the University of Texas, when employees from ICES walk into a conference, people notice. To stay at the top of its game, in early 2007 ICES decided to replace the seven-year-old cluster supporting its Computational Visualization Center because it could not deliver the real-time performance researchers needed. Although ICES uses servers from multiple vendors including Sun, the institute choose to build on Sun technologies. “Sun provides high-quality design, amazing built-in system management tools — and you can just tell that whoever designed the machine loved it,” explains Chris Simmons, Manager of Computing Services at ICES. “Sun servers are reliable. I can easily hot-swap parts. Our Sun representative and our reseller PetroSys Solutions put together an amazing deal so we could stay within a very small budget.” ICES built its cluster on 23 Sun Fire servers, eight NVIDIA Quadro Plex IV Visual Computing Systems, and one Sun StorageTek 2530 array. The servers, which run ROCKS, an open-source Linux cluster distribution based upon CentOS and Sun Grid Engine. One Sun Fire X2200 is the master node and two Sun Fire X2100s support I/O nodes. Twenty Sun Fire X2200s, each with two dual-core AMD Opteron processors, serve as compute nodes. Each Sun Fire X2200 has two PCI Express I/O slots. ICES uses one slot for a QLogic InfiniPath InfiniBand adaptor that can transfer 10 million messages per second between clustered servers. The second PCI slot holds a 1x 16 PCI-E riser to facilitate high-speed communication with the Quadro Plex systems, which collectively deliver 24 GB of video RAM. One Sun StorageTek 2530 array, with 12 300 GB SAS drives, provides short-term storage. To accelerate the transfer of stored data on the cluster, ICES uses the Lustre file system. All of the Sun servers are managed by administrators four floors above the data center, using the Sun N1 Server Manager and the Sun Grid Engine.
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Our Sun sales representative and our reseller Petrosys Solutions worked on every single point of our solution to make sure that our vision came together for our budget. Our solution offers amazing price/performance.
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— Chris Simmons, Manager of Computing Services, ICES
ICES finished deploying the cluster in September 2007. Several weeks later, a senior Sun engineer conducted a three-day training course on using Sun Studio 12 to optimize cluster applications. “The class got nothing but rave reviews,” notes Simmons. “I’ve had four or five people send me an e-mail just to say how great the new cluster is,” Simmons concludes. “Visualization works 50 times faster than on our previous systems, so we can process twice as many jobs. We’re also able to move data around the network 20 times faster than before. Our old cluster was available 98% to 99% of the time, and our new cluster is at 99.99%.” In addition, the Sun Fire X2200 servers use 28% less power than Xeon–based servers, which helps cut cooling costs. “There's a big difference between the heat coming off my Intel clusters and my Sun Opteron clusters,” Simmons adds. Always looking to improve its IT environment, ICES is planning to consolidate some older systems on Sun Blade 6000 servers. The institute is also evaluating a virtualized storage solution built on a Sun StorageTek 6140 array and Sun StorageTek SAM-FS software. |
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