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University of Utah: C-SAFE Uses Linux HPCC in Fire Research
2/3/2003
A high performance computing cluster (HPCC) is an increasingly popular method for delivering computational power to CPU-hungry scientific applications. A cluster consists of several commodity personal computer systems (desktop or rackmount) connected with a commodity or special-purpose network. The low cost of these systems makes an attractive option for a wide range of scientific applications.
In 1997, the University of Utah created an alliance with the Department of Energy (D'E) Accelerated Simulation and Computing Program (ASCP), formerly ASCI, to form the Center for the Simulation of Accidental Fires and Explosions (C-SAFE, www.csafe.utah.edu). C-SAFE focuses specifically on providing state-of-the-art, science-based tools for the numerical simulation of accidental fires and explosions, especially within the context of the handling and storage of highly flammable materials. The primary objective of C-SAFE is to provide a software system comprising a Problem Solving Environment in which fundamental chemistry and engineering physics are fully coupled with non-linear solvers, optimization, computational steering, visualization, and experimental data verification. The availability of simulations using this system will help to better evaluate the risks and safety issues associated with fires and explosions. Our goal is to integrate and deliver a system that is validated and documented for practical application to accidents involving both hydrocarbon and energetic materials. Efforts of this nature require expertise from a wide variety of academic disciplines.
Additional Resources
Simulation of an explosive in a fire involves computing thermodynamics, fluid
mechanics, chemical reactions, and other physical processes at each of millions
to billions of points in the simulation domain. These scenarios require significant
computing resources to perform accurately. Simulations performed to date employed
hundreds to thousands of processors for days at a time to simulate portions
of this problem. Fortunately, we were also granted time on the D'E ASCP computers
at Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia National Laboratories. These machines
are some of the fastest in the world, and we received considerable allocations
of CPU time as a part of the C-SAFE grant. However, sometimes these resources
are not enough.
Recently, the University of Utah purchased a Linux cluster that will be used to augment the resources provided to us through the D'E. The cluster will be used for development and debugging of the simulation, parameter studies, and small- to medium-scale simulations. Large-scale computations will still require use of the larger D'E ASCP computing resources. Unlike the shared D'E resources, the cluster will be largely devoted to C-SAFE research 365 days a year.
This cluster consists of 128 Dell PowerEdge 2550 servers, each containing two Pentium 4 Xeon processors. The entire cluster contains 256 Gigabytes of main memory and over nine Terabytes of disk space. Each server (node) runs the Linux operating system, and is networked with a Gigabit Ethernet (currently being installed). This is a class of system often referred to as a Beowulf cluster, named after one of the first systems to demonstrate this concept. The cluster is listed on the November 2002 Top 500 list (www.top500.org) as the 89th fastest computer in the world.
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