Irish supercomputers are to become part of a global network of number crunchers, writes Dick Ahlstrom
University College Cork has a new research tool: a €180,000 supercomputer. Mathematicians and computer scientists will put the parallel computer through its paces on campus, but the new system is also the latest element of Grid-Ireland, the national computational grid.
"The grid is the computing paradigm of the future," says Dr John Morrison of the college's computer-science department. "We are cementing ourselves into the European and the world grid effort." Dr Morrison is a director of Grid-Ireland with Dr Brian Coghlan of Trinity College in Dublin and Dr Andy Shearer of NUI Galway. "Grid-Ireland came into being two and a half years ago as a result of funding from Enterprise Ireland, basically to investigate doing this kind of work," he says.
The object is to link supercomputers at the three centres, to integrate their number-crunching potential. "It is effectively connecting the island's computer power into one."
The new computer is housed at UCC's Boole Centre for Research in Informatics, an initiative funded by the Higher Education Authority. It brings together expertise from the departments of mathematics and computer science, with Dr Morrison and Prof Patrick Fitzpatrick serving as directors. The computer, which is the size of a filing cabinet, doesn't look very special, but it packs vast computing power. Its 100 processing units operate at 126 billion cycles per second, fast enough to move all the data in a stack of documents 2.5 metres high from one unit to another in a second. It can store the same amount of data as a 9km stack of printed pages - higher than Mount Everest.
Imagine the processing power if the three colleges connected their systems in a seamless interactive network. This is the idea behind Grid-Ireland and the broader grid concept, an initiative proposed and led by CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research.
The grid is a natural progression from the World Wide Web, another CERN idea. CERN wants it because the grid will link high-performance computers over extremely fast networks, making it possible to transfer the massive quantities of data CERN produces in its advanced particle colliders.
In the same way that non- scientific uses were found for the Web, governments and companies expect equally innovative uses to be found for the grid. IBM is spending about €10 billion a year on grid-related research for this reason, says Dr Morrison.
The grid has already started to form, but it has a long way to go. An initiative called the Globus Project has produced agreed software to support the grid, but it is difficult to use for those trying to mesh their systems with it, says Dr Morrison. He and his colleagues in the computer-science department are attempting to overcome these difficulties by developing better grid-interface software. (The college's mathematicians will use their access to the supercomputer for solving large-scale numerical problems, such as modelling fluid flow.)
"We are attempting to make the grid invisible, so that the person can just worry about solving a problem," he says. "These are the applications of the future." The object is to make the grid as invisible to the user as the Web is on the Internet. When you log on you don't have to think about what the Web is doing; it is just there, providing access and information. The grid will do this, too, but at a much higher level, to support more and faster data.
But it is not only about high-performance number-crunching. Other uses will include information-mining, through massive databases, or focusing grid computing power on tumour X-rays to calculate the optimal radiation dose a patient should receive. The Republic will have to be in the grid if it wants to benefit.