Specialized Servers

This year NERSC installed two platforms for users with specialized processing needs: a remote visualization server and a symbolic manipulation server.

The visualization server, named "escher," allows NERSC users to perform visualizations from remote locations and develop new techniques in large data visualization and collaboration. It is a Silicon Graphics Onyx 2 system with six 195 MHz R10000 processors, 3 GB of memory, two InfiniteReality graphics pipes, ATM, HIPPI, 100 BT network connectivity, and a 100 GB disk array.

Its dual graphics pipes allow for two simultaneous graphics displays to be driven by the system, for a minimum of two simultaneous video streams. The server supports nearly 20 visualization, graphics, and data formatting packages.

In one major application, escher was used in conjunction with an ImmersaDesk to display medical data showing a human spine. The data was volume-rendered in 3D so the viewer could move around and inside the vertebrae. The path of the spinal cord was shown as a 3D curve along with 2D slices through the data perpendicular to this curve.

Escher has also been used as the visualization platform for an architectural lighting simulation system known as RADIANCE. This project involved using the massively parallel architecture of the Cray T3E to perform calculations while using escher to visualize the results.

In the future, the techniques developed with this project will allow NERSC researchers to visualize their simulations in real time from remote locations.

The NERSC symbolic manipulation server, named "newton," allows users to perform symbolic and numerical mathematical and statistical operations. This system complements NERSC's high performance systems by providing a dedicated platform for non-floating-point-intensive calculations. The Sun server has a single 248 MHz UltraSPARC-II CPU, 512 MB of memory, and 26 GB of user disk space. Installed applications include MATLAB, Mathematica, Maple, SAS, and S-Plus.