Advanced Systems Group

A new Advanced Systems Group, headed by Tammy Welcome, was formed to assess and implement new computing technologies. While the NERSC-3 procurement is the group's highest priority, they will also have responsibility for the Sun Wildfire cluster and the SGI Origin 2000.

As part of our research into alternative computer architectures, NERSC is participating in a collaborative research program with Sun Microsystems involving a prototype shared-memory multiprocessor system code-named WildFire. Sun is using WildFire to explore possible architectures for highly-scalable NUMA-based (non-uniform memory access) servers. A goal of WildFire is to evaluate the effectiveness of leveraging large SMPs in the construction of even larger systems.

The WildFire installed at NERSC connects four Sun Ultra Enterprise E4000s to form a system with 32 167 MHz UltraSPARC 2 processors, 6144 MB of memory, and a 150 GB disk.

NERSC staff are testing and evaluating this prototype system and providing feedback to Sun. Areas of particular interest are system design (scheduling, memory management, resource allocation), system administration, benchmarking, algorithm development, and system scalability.

The Advanced Systems Group is also testing the SGI Origin 2000 to evaluate its performance in production scientific computing.