By Phil Williams
Faculty at the university will soon be able to solve much larger problems, thanks to the arrival on campus of a new, dramatically faster computer.
The Origin 2000 symmetric multiprocessor by Silicon Graphics will be installed soon in the University Computing and Networking Services center in the Boyd Graduate Studies Building. It cost more than $900,000, nearly half of which came from a National Science Foundation competitive grant. The remainder of the funding came from the UGA Research Foundation through lottery funds and from UCNS.
Investigate larger problems
"We believe this computer will have a significant impact as our faculty use it to investigate larger problems in areas such as chemical structures and physical systems," says Walter McRae, associate vice president in charge of computer services.
The Origin 2000 will allow a large consortium of faculty members represented in the grant proposal to study problems that cannot be solved on current computers. These groups of researchers--from areas such as mathematics, physics, chemistry and computer science--will have first use of the new computer, though others can write proposals for its use. Faculty will be able to access the Origin 2000 from their desktops through the university's computer network.
Giant step forward
"While we have put large amounts of money into computers for teaching labs on campus over the past six years, we have not been able to keep up with research computing for faculty," says physicist David Landau, director of the Center for Simulational Physics and
co-principal investigator for the NSF grant. "This new computer is going to be a great step forward for us."
The university has traditionally had a strong computing program for faculty. In the 1980s, the Cyber 205 Vector Supercom-puter was one of the best at a research school in the country. But that computer was decommissioned here in 1987, and computing has radically changed in the past decade. Work seen as astonishing on the Cyber can now be done on a desktop computer, says Landau.
In those days, computers working together had to operate somewhat like an assembly line, with all data being input to a processor simultaneously for sequential operation. These days, computers work in a configuration called parallel processing--with separate processors working on different parts of a problem at the same time. The computing time is dramatically cut.
"Science in general has gone on to much bigger problems than we could handle only a few years back," says Landau. "We don't want to do the same things that we were doing 10 years ago."
The Origin 2000 computer will begin with 16 processors or nodes and will be upgraded to 24 in about a year. Most importantly, all processors will have direct access to all of the computer's six gigabytes of memory.
"The upgrade will incorporate the latest chips available in the fall of 1998, and it will give us a three-fold increase in performance capacity over what we will have later this fall," says McRae.
The Origin 2000 offers a golden opportunity to graduates students as well.
"It is really going to give graduate students and new faculty the opportunity to follow through on great ideas," says Landau.
"It doesn't help to have a great idea if it's going to take three or four years to get your data from a computer," he also says. "This a big step for us, but it's only the first step. We already need to plan for future improvements."
