NCSA and the PACI Programme - ten more years of HPC in the USA

Mannheim, 21-6-97 The PACI Programme Consortium, managed by NCSA, is one of the two consortia funded by the NSF for the next ten years. John Towns, Associate Director at NCSA Illinois, explained the status of the project, three months after the NSF desicion, at the Mannheim Supercomputer Seminar.

Major partners in the NCSA led alliance are CalTech, UCLA, and the universities at Texas, Michigan, Maryland, and Berkely. One of the goals is to prototype a National Technology "Grid". The grid consists of:

leading edge centres, which are the major resources on the Grid,
Enabling Technologies Teams that are the architects of the Grid,
Application Technologies Teams,
Education, Outreach and Training teams
Regional partners that provide access to the Grid.

There are three enabling technologies teams, explained Towns. The VisualComputing Team will create tools for parallel computing. The Grid and Middleware team will provide tools for heterogeneous computing. The Information and Collaboration team will take care of data and collaborative computing.

"This summer", said Towns, "we will get ready to launch the alliance."High performance networks will be set up and the virtual environment CAVES will be coupled. The alliance wil create a repository and rough out the client interfaces.

Furthermore, this summer will be used to set up support for US national users. The alliance will be extended to mid-level centres and will work as a virtual team. Early big users will be recruited amongst the current Pittsburgh and Cornell users. Together with the other NSF funded consortium, NPACI, an allocation process procedure will be set up.

To support all the activities, NCSA has created a new I-Tech Division. This division will develop an alliance wide Intranet/Extranet. Technology is needed for instance to manage data and to capture, archive, access and update data. Collaborative administration and development tools must be made available.

The I-Tech Division will be involved in Intranet testbeds and development, including NT/Unix interoperability and scalability and building up core competence in Commercial IT: OS, object technologies, WWW and databases.

But, as Towns explained, NCSA is also already working on new proposals for the coming year. A joint NCSA/LCSE/EVL project will create a national analysis and visualisation facility. A 6400 x 4800 pixel display for interactive VR will be powered by an SGI Reality Monster with 64 r10000 processors and 8 Infinite Reality Graphics Engines and 32 Gbytes of Main memory. The SGI will be connected through 8 HiPPI and ATM channels to 1.12. Tbytes of disk space with a 1.2 Gb/s sustained bandwidth.

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