World's fastest Mac-Based cluster in PortugalLisbon 19 June 2001 The world's fastest Mac-based cluster for plasma particle research is installed in Europe: epp. Researchers at Grupo de Lasers e Plasmas (GoLP) say the epp cluster is the first milestone of the GoLP simulation program in Extreme Plasma Physics. GoLP is located in the campus of Instituto Superior Tecnico (IST), Lisbon . The cluster is used for numerical simulation of plasmas, novel plasma particle acceleration schemes using ultra intense lasers, and relativistic shocks in astrophysics.
"When we started to plan our epp cluster, we were interested in a switch that
could grow with it -- upgradeable to the maximum number of machines we planned,
but still allowing us to move, at least partially, to a Gbit/s network," said
Luis Silva, Assistant Professor of Physics at IST. "IntraCore 8000 provides
these two features: it is upgradeable up to 48 ports at 100Mb/s, or 3 x 1 Gbit/s
ports. Thus, we can invest in the networking infrastructure as the cluster
`grows' without too much of an initial effort. The IntraCore 8000 was the only
switch on the market that would allow for this sustained growth."
A co-creator of Project AppleSeed, the parallel processing system upon which the
epp cluster is based, also praises the IC8000. "In one AppleSeed cluster
installation, we had to return a Cisco switch because it did not work well with
AppleTalk. Cisco's technical support staff was not familiar with Macs and could
not help us set it up correctly," stated Viktor Decyk, Research Physicist and
Adjunct Professor at UCLA. "Asante products always work well with Macs right out
of the box."
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