Accepting a new set of challenges

Story posted November 9, 2006

Lincoln comes to Illinois

Many of the systems at NCSA are supported by the National Science Foundation. They're used by the national research community and allocated by a centralized board that parcels out time on NSF-funded systems around the country. The newest addition to the machine room floor breaks that mold.

Lincoln, an 11-teraflop cluster of Dell PowerEdge™ blade servers, is funded by the state of Illinois. Time on the cluster will be allocated at the discretion of the leadership of the new Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies. It will be devoted in large part to strategic institute, campus, and state initiatives and will be used by NCSA's private sector partners. This set up allows for additional flexibility in developing new research themes for the institute, deeper relationships with users of computing time, and a more nimble organization.

"The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has identified several major new initiatives this past year, including initiatives in sustainable energy and the environment, integrated sciences for health, and informatics and intends to be a major player in the development and use of petascale computing. All of these initiatives need advanced computing capabilities," says Thom Dunning, director of the Institute for Advance Computation and NCSA. "A focus of the institute will be to provide the resources, expertise, and good ideas needed to move these initiatives forward. Lincoln is a crucial part of that goal."

Lincoln is currently capable of about 11 teraflops, or 11 trillion mathematical calculations per second. In the coming months, the system will be upgraded further for greater capability. At that point, it is expected to be the largest supercomputing resource funded by a university for science, engineering, and humanities and for use by private sector program partners.

Lincoln follows in the path of two other Dell clusters that NCSA offers to the national research community -- Tungsten and T2. Tungsten, which is supported by the National Science Foundation and is allocated through NSF's peer reviewed process, is an extremely popular resource, attracting requests for allocations that far exceed the amount of time available on the system. T2 has been extensively used by the center's private sector partners since it was added to the machine room late in 2004.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign creates the Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies with NCSA.

Computing and information technologies are among the most significant achievements of the 20th century. These advances exert a significant impact on scholarly disciplines, not only in those areas of science and engineering that have provided the initial seedbed but in new and rapidly expanding communities--life sciences, environmental research, business, healthcare, and the social sciences, arts, and humanities.

Far-reaching outcomes for the 21st century will change the way we discover new knowledge, predict the behavior of complex natural and engineered systems, and manage and analyze data. These changes will improve our health, security, and economic welfare. The transformation of data to information to knowledge to applications that benefit society represents a grand challenge.

To realize the full potential of this rapid growth, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is creating the Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies (IACAT). The institute will combine faculty-initiated research in its academic units with the advanced technology capabilities at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).

"IACAT will promote synergies between research faculty in different disciplines and NCSA staff," says Thom Dunning, director of IACAT and NCSA, "positioning both to solve the nation's most challenging problems, provide a supporting cyberinfrastructure that will enable extraordinary research advances, and extend the impact of that research. It will deploy those solutions beyond their original points of inquiry."

By forming alliances with other campus institutes and groups, IACAT will create infrastructure that promises advances that go far beyond the knowledge of any particular researcher or community.

NCSA Inside

The great promise offered by computing and information technologies will best be realized if the experts creating new computing and information technologies and infrastructure are closely coupled with discipline-based researchers who are deeply involved in developing research applications that make full use of these new capabilities. Collaborative multidisciplinary research is at the heart of this activity.

"Multidisciplinary research and development has always been a core strength of our campus, and it is becoming increasingly important as science and engineering tackle the complex problems confronting our nation and our world," says University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Chancellor Richard Herman. "The Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies will combine NCSA's world-class development and deployment of advanced computing technologies with faculty at the University of Illinois who are pushing the boundaries of their applications. It is an incredibly powerful mixture that will profoundly affect the future of research and education."

The unique role of the institute will be to foster deep partnerships with NCSA, which has contributed significantly to the birth and growth of the worldwide cyberinfrastructure. NCSA operates some of the world's most powerful supercomputers and develops the software infrastructure needed to use these systems efficiently. The institute will harness the national cyberinfrastructure and, at the same time, inform the creators of that infrastructure about important application areas where new and improved tools and methods are needed. IACAT, with NCSA inside, will provide unparalleled opportunities to advance domain-specific applications of advanced computing and information technologies while spurring the development of new computing and information technologies.

Research themes

The scope and complexity of advanced computing applications and technologies require close collaboration across many disciplines and skills. IACAT will be organized around a set of research themes that will address major opportunities and challenges that are too complex for individuals or even small groups of researchers to tackle on their own.

"Research themes will be defined by combining bottom-up creativity with the strategic positioning of NCSA and the campus," says Dunning. Research themes will be broadly defined and may include projects that span multiple disciplines. A series of workshops, begun in 2005 and continuing through 2008, is exploring possible research themes.

Because different fields have different approaches to research, newly developing communities may take time to emerge and connect with NCSA. Community-building activities will therefore be important in addition to traditional research. It is expected that research themes and projects will serve to position university and NCSA researchers for emerging opportunities. For example, strategic initiatives recently announced by the university include:

The Illinois Sustainable Energy and Environment Initiative, which will use the campus' unique interdisciplinary strengths in science and technology, economics, the humanities, and the social sciences to develop new technologies, practices, and policies in the sustainable use of vital resources such as energy, water, and land.
The Integrated Sciences for Health Initiative, which will apply Illinois' expertise in the physical sciences, engineering, and information, medical and life sciences to improve human health.
The Illinois Informatics Initiative, which is an integrated approach to prepare students for the information-technology enabled workforce in the natural sciences, humanities, social sciences, and the arts and on decision support for business and government.

Resources

The institute will be staffed by faculty from university academic units and by NCSA academic professionals. The university is making new resources available to launch the Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies. The institute will work in close partnership with participating academic units beginning in the 2006-07 academic year to identify and recruit institute faculty. The institute will share the new 140,000-square-foot building with NCSA.

"This university has a great history of support for computing that provides high-end resources and tools that scientists and other researchers need to answer their most challenging questions," says Herman. "The Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies will target those areas that stand to make the most of that support. It will be a gift to future generations of researchers, ensuring that the work that they do will take advantage of the continuing revolution in computing."

For more information about the Institute, please see http://www.iacat.uiuc.edu/.

A .pdf version of this story is available.

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