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National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) is one of two top universities in Taiwan, and supports a large internal and external research community. Scientific research requires significant computing capability. The University's computer center serves as an important hub in the Taiwan regional network, and NCKU was faced with a 60 percent increase in users from both the university's research staff, especially in Electrical Engineering, Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics, and, recently, Aerospace Engineering, as well as members of the public. As a result, the existing NCKU infrastructure was unable to cope with this increasing demand. To support its research environment, NCKU needed to expand to enterprise-scale computing capabilities with high availability to meet the growing demand from researchers.

The Ministry of Education of Taiwan assigned NCKU the task of allocating students to universities based on the country's annual union examination for university entrance. To complete this task, NCKU had initially purchased a Sun Fire 12K server due to its stability and processing power. When NCKU needed to increase its server capacity, it turned to Sun once again. "Our experience with the Sun Fire 12K was very positive, especially the hardware partition that we used to dynamically manage system resources for a variety of demands from users," says Dr. Shieh, Ce Kuen, the chairman of Computer and Network Center of NCKU.

Deployment began in January 2008 and took one month to complete. NCKU deployed a Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server with 48 SPARC64 VI processors to deliver greater dependability, availability, and performance. The Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server, which runs the Solaris 10 Operating System, is maximized for 24x7 mission-critical computing and provides highly scalable growth for the university. By coupling two StorageTek 6540s through a SAN (storage area network), the SPARC Enterprise M9000 delivers much higher I/O performance and larger storage capacity. “In making our selection, the M9000 series server offered higher and faster throughput processors, and a larger memory footprint than our existing Sun Fire 12K server. We also benefited from larger I/O configuration and capacity,” says Dr. Shieh.

In addition, NCKU migrated some of its applications from the Sun Fire 12K to the M9000 server. However, they have retained the Sun Fire 12K server, and plan to dedicate it to research and study SMP parallel compute projects.

To meet its high performance computing needs, NCKU deployed Sun Fire X2200 M2 servers and Sun Fire X4200 M2 servers. The 128 Sun Fire X2200 M2 server compute nodes have two dual core 2.6Ghz AMD Opteron processors with 8 GB memory to provide a fast, stable, and energy-efficient system that runs virtually any operating system, and can be easily expanded when the University demands. NCKU runs five Sun Fire X4200 M2 servers, each with two dual-core AMD Opteron processors. Voltaire Grid Director provides NCKU the fastest, lowest latency high-speed interconnect to accelerate application run times and increase file I/O access speeds.

NCKU is meeting its storage requirements with two Sun StorageTek 6140 arrays connected to the Sun N1 System Manager and Lustre file system, which offers storage for network shared applications and user home directories. Two Sun Fire X4500 hybrid data servers provide a working storage with high capacity and high throughput to accelerate data transfers.

The University is running the Solaris 10 Operating System with the Sun N1 System Manager, the Sun Grid Engine, and the Lustre file system. The Sun N1 System Manager software enables NCKU administrators to provision, monitor, patch, and manage hundreds of servers from a single console.

Sun Grid Engine 6.0 is meeting the University's needs while minimizing costs. “Our professors, teachers and students can benefit from using this software in their labs and for research purposes,” says Dr. Shieh.

“The management of the M9000 server is truly dynamic. We are now investigating whether the M9000 can be upgraded with quad-core SPARC64 VII processors to increase our compute power. In addition to satisfying performance and throughput, the M9000 server eases management efforts and reduces demands on human resources.”

In order to fulfill the growing demand of HPC cluster and SMP compute performance, the Computer and Network Center of NCKU works closely with Sun and Sun’s partner Stark Technology, Inc. to integrate more software applications with the HPC systems. The software includes MEEP, HDF5, Gaussian, Linda, FFTW, BLAS, LAPACK, etc. More applications are under consideration and planned for deployment or grid integration. There are also in-house developed applications for a variety of research projects and study at NCKU.

With the Sun HPC systems, professors and students of NCKU can speed up and scale up their research and study. There are published theses and papers resulting from these HPC systems, and the results are remarkably satisfying.

 
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