St. Francis Xavier University

Increasing Performance for Complex Physics Research

St. Francis Xavier University (StFX) in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, is the number one primarily undergraduate university in Canada with a longstanding tradition of academic excellence, service to society and innovation in teaching. The university turned to Sun to enhance its capacity for conducting physics research in partnership with industry.

Customer Challenges

Perform research using non-commercial software written by researchers
Run very complex software designed to run on clusters
Increase software performance by improving CPU and memory speed
Scale to support simultaneous use of more CPUs

Solution

StFX university deployed a cluster of AMD Opteron-based Sun Fire V20z servers running Solaris and connected via Myrinet network, with Sun StorageTek storage arrays.

Business Results

Delivers a powerful and scalable physics research hub
Meets the need to run complex algorithmic computations
Lowers the total cost of high-performance computing (HPC)
Leverages existing IT investments
Implemented without disruption in a very short time

Products and Services

Story Details

When Nova Scotia’s St. Francis Xavier University set out to reinforce its role as a regional hub for academic research and enhance partnership opportunities with private industry, such as oil and gas companies, the university turned to Sun. Much of the research performed at St. Francis Xavier University involves the modeling of various algorithms to prove or disprove a given thesis in the Physics Department. That level of research requires high-performance computing (HPC), which necessitated enhancing the university’s computing environment.

The Sun solution combines a compelling operating system with a high-performance system architecture. Previously St. Francis Xavier used Red Hat’s Linux operating system, but the university decided to switch to the Solaris operating system for increased speed, ease of systems management and optimal price/performance. Sun’s solution includes a cluster of Sun Fire V20z servers that use the AMD Opteron processor, with many of the servers utilizing Myricom’s Myrinet technology. Additionally, Sun’s HPC team also provided a custom-built message passing interface (MPI) framework for the environment and configured the entire system to run Solaris.

The Sun solution provides a low latency, high-bandwidth interconnect network between a portion of the servers to facilitate the passing of large data sets between processors residing in separate systems. Components include Sun’s resource management solution (N1 Grid Engine), systems management solution (Control Station), and software compiler suite (Sun Studio). The built-in integration of these important solution components with Solaris provides an ease of management and level of utility not found in commonly- used open-source offerings. Moreover, the combination of Solaris with Sun Studio yields even higher performance. Construction of the system occurred with no disruption.

As a result, the new system enables advanced computational physics research in the modeling of crystal formations in liquids and of biological membranes and the molecules that interact with them, as well as research on phase transitions in ferromagnets and polymers. St. Francis Xavier is very confident in its ability to support future research.