Northern Italian Universities Install NEC SX-5 SupercomputerMilan 17 April 2001 The introduction of the NEC SX-5S entry level server, last year, is anabling many businesses and academic institutions to take advantage of the efficiencies of parallel vector processors at an affordable price. As is well known PVPs are well suited for "large scale Nastran Problems". One academic centre which is taking advantage of this, is the Northern Italian Universities Consortium.
In December 2000 the Consorzio Interuniversitario Lombardo per la Elaborazione Automatica (CILEA) - The Lombardy inter-university consortium for computing - purchased an entry level, 4 CPU NEC SX-5S/4 supercomputer, with 16 GBytes of SDRAM shared memory and a peak performance of 16 Gflop/s. This system has been operational from early January 2001.
The CILEA consortium is the second of its kind in Italy, after CINECA at Bologna. CILEA is active in numerical simulation, networking, library automation, digital library, multi-media data bases, and medicine.
In the field of High Performance Computing, CILEA has a number of advanced technology systems based on either sequential or parallel architectures and ranks amongst the top 30 academic and scientific centres in Europe and second in Italy.
CILEA owns a Numerical Simulation Research Centre, supporting innovative research which requires large scale computational resources. It also promotes technology transfer activities, disseminating advanced numerical simulation techniques to small and medium-sized enterprises with a view to improve their competitiveness in the market.
According to Ing. Giovanni Meloni, second in command at CILEA, a significant use of the SX-5S/4 will be for applications in the automotive field, by industrial customers using the CILEA's computers. They will be using application packages, such as, MSC Nastran and ESI Pam Crash for the development of new car models and crash simulations. These packages have also been used for many years, on other systems, by the Aerospace Department of Politecnico of Milan.
Other applications include thermo-fluid-dynamic simulations in engineering and meteorology, the simulation of electromagnetic fields and many other applications which normally require high computational resources.
In addition, university users from the fields of chemistry, bio-technology, and material science, are interested to run molecular dynamics codes.
With regards to the use of IT in the field of medicine, CILEA is developing many advanced medical applications, including handling radiological, tomographical and Neural Magnetic Resonance Images, Electro-Cardiac-Graph signals, echography animation and these can be inserted into patients' case histories. All these data can then be made available via the Internet to the First Aid Doctor in an emergency situation.
CILEA is a mirror site for the anatomical human images database, implemented by the National Library of Medicine, USA, which consists of over 50 GBytes of data and also for the MEDLINE database consisting of an exhaustive collection of bio-medical reviews.
Other activities include Geographic Information Systems, Arts and the Environment and cultural Heritage. For example, multimedia applications and advanced database techniques and digital imaging have been implemented, to foster research and access to artistic and archaeological material.
Apart from computing resources a consultancy service is provided advising on solving real application problems. This may include scientific co-operation between users and teaching staff from the universities within the consortium.
Interesting enough, the installation of the NEC SX-5S/4, is a "return to vector" at CILEA after many years of providing scalar-parallel computing resources. Their previous vector experience was on the IBM 390VF and the CONVEX C series in the 1980s.
CILEA is a non-profit organisation pooling eight Universities of Lombard ( Northern Italy ), including the prestigious state universities and the polytechnic of Milan. CILEA is physically located in Segrate, a suburb of Milan. CILEA's activities are under the supervision of the Ministry of University and Scientific and Technological Research ( MURST ). CILEA provides technology solutions to the academic and research world, and to some industrial users in the area. For more information visit their website : http://www.cilea.it
Chris Lazou |
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