Why High Performance Computing?
Many of our most important engineering and scientific problems today require the ability to manage ever-growing volumes of data and to evaluate increasingly complex computational models. Developing solutions for greater processing capacity has thus become critical to progress in an increasing number of fields.
By using systems of interconnected computer clusters and the concept of parallel computing to distribute tasks over multiple processors at once, high performance computing makes it possible to tackle single problems with unprecedented computing power. Not only does it enable researchers to perform existing operations much faster and in greater volume than ever before, but also to solve problems so complex they would be unfeasible without the capabilities of high-volume parallel processing.
The High Performance Computing Initiative at ASU
The Ira A. Fulton School High Performance Computing Initiative (HPCI) at Arizona State University offers world-class high performance computing to the school's researchers and their industrial partners. The HPCI's mission is to be:
- A center for best practice in the support of, application of, and education in cluster computers for high performance scientific computing.
- A hub for collaborative science and engineering, where novel use of high performance scientific computing leads to new innovation and accelerated scientific progress.
- A center for research in new ideas in the architectures, operating systems, and applications of high performance computer systems.
The US Council on Competitiveness, in recognizing the significance of high-performance computing to modern product design, has declared in the global marketplace, "to out-compete is to out-compute." High Performance Computing is a focus at every national lab, every university, and most of the Fortune 500. However, many high performance computing centers run below capacity, largely due to a lack of qualified users and operators.
The Fulton HPCI will meet these challenges by being one of the first supercomputer facilities focused on the integration of undergraduate education with high performance computing to produce the next generation of engineering research leaders fluent in computational science.
Facilities
 The HPCI main facility supports more computing power per square foot than virtually any other university facility; 750,000 watts in only 1,200 sq. feet. It totals approximately 1,000 processors, each as fast as or faster than a single top-of-the-line desktop computer. The facility's central computing cluster, Saguaro, is capable of sustained performance of more that four trillion computations per second (two teraflops) on 400 processors.
Within two years, the Fulton HPCI will provide 30 Teraflops of computing power, more than any academic computing center can currently provide. Most academic computing centers are limited in growth by their cooling capacity. The Fulton HPCI has constructed machine room facilities with innovative new cooling technologies, which will provide available thermal capacity far beyond what is available at any other university today.
The HPCI will create an advanced campus-area grid infrastructure for the School, providing both large central computing facilities and leveraging distributed satellite compute clusters assigned to particular laboratories.
The HPCI currently has satellite clusters dedicated to:
Services
Services offered by the HPCI to researchers, students, and industrial partners include:
- A variety of computing systems
- Mathematical and scientific computing tools
- Visualization resources
- Research storage services
- Training courses in high performance computing and applications
Research
The HPCI makes possible the application of HPC technology to the wide range of research areas explored by faculty across campus. The following projects are a few examples of the results of collaborative efforts between researchers and the HPCI.
Turbulent Flow
 HPC technology is well-adapted to the complexity of computational fluid dynamics. This project involved the modeling of turbulent flow, crucial to the design of such mechanical systems as cars, planes, and pipelines. This image shows turbulent flow around the body of an F-18 in flight.
Golf Ball Design
 In collaboration with the HPCI, ASU's Decision Theater, and industry partners, mechanical and aerospace engineering researchers from the Fulton School applied techniques for modeling aerodynamic flow around objects such as aircraft to the simulation of golf ball performance. Read more under News.
Environmental Fluid Dynamics
 The San Diego Wildfires project was produced by the Environmental Fluid Dynamics group at ASU. The resulting images depict what happened to the smoke and pollution from the October 2003 wildfire in San Diego. They are an aggregate of multiple simulations at the local and national scale, produced by complex climate modeling techniques to simulate the physical processes involved, such as the changes in air temperature and pressure.
Solid State Science
 A common engineering challenge for space shuttles, communication satellites, and other spacecraft is corrosion caused by "atomic oxygen," which attacks metals in the upper atmosphere. Materials science researchers used the lab to model the possible scenarios caused at different energy levels: oxygen can either stick to material and modify its composition, ionize it by stealing electrons, or change it by cutting molecules apart. They then modeled the results of the use of special polymers which cause oxygen to bounce off at any energy level, protecting the craft from corrosion.
Silicon-Germanium hybrids
An electrical engineering application of high performance technology is the modeling of the chemical processes involved in the creation of material alloys. Current electronics are made from silicon, which has at this point been pushed as far as it can be in terms of its potential speed and power. Researchers on this project used supercomputing power to model the process that could be used to make a potential substitute, a hybrid of silicon and germanium. The video shows the result: at very high temperatures, we can make a gas of silicon and germanium, and cause that gas to attach itself to a silicon base, making new kinds of devices possible.
Carbon Sequestration
 Another current materials research problem is carbon sequestration, or how to remove and store carbon from the atmosphere, as part of the effort to mitigate the effects of global warming. The most promising technology so far is combining carbon with magnesium to form a white powder composed of magnesium carbonate. The problem researchers tried to address in this project is that magnesium extraction causes glass to form on the surface, inhibiting the reaction by preventing the extraction of magnesium. This simulation used a combination of quantum and classical methods to understand and model the process.
Biophysics, protein mutation
 This project is from the Single Molecule Biophysics Institute, part of ASU's Biodesign Institute. Simulation techniques using knowledge of the physical properties of molecules made it possible to "unfold" protein models in order to examine the effects of mutations on protein chains and explore how medications might interact with these proteins.
Internal Research
In keeping with its mission at the university to not only enable the research of other fields but also to innovate in the area of HPC technology, the center also engages in systems research. Ongoing projects include Dynamic Virtual Clustering in conjunction with Cluster Resources, Inc. For more information, see Research.
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Saturday November 07, 2009 
