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Made to order in less than a week
The model has already shown researchers many of the flow's characteristics—that it is marked by large velocity and pressure fluctuations with a dominant frequency and that introducing a vibration reducer significantly calms that dominant vibration. Nonetheless, Shell researchers would like to know a lot more. To that end, Jeremy Enos, part of the NCSA team, helped install an eight-processor Linux computing cluster at a Shell research facility in Houston in January 2001. The Shell team plans to expand the cluster and install the Alliance's GenIDLEST software in early 2002.
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Getting the cluster up and running in less than a week was possible only because of OSCAR, the Open Source Cluster Application Resources. This suite of tools and software has everything needed to install, maintain, and use a modest-sized Linux cluster. OSCAR is now a part of the Alliance's larger Cluster-in-a-Box software package. "Danesh and Raghu have been talking about this for years," says Sundaresan Bala, who managed Shell's relationship with NCSA until his recent retirement. "When the time came to update our in-house computational fluid dynamics capability, they saw an opportunity, and they took it. Now we have a cheap, easily installed system and the room to grow. With this system and our other eight or so clusters in other groups at Shell, PC Linux clusters are an important part of our high-performance computing strategy." |
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Streamwise velocity of the flow in modeled vacuum flasher with and without vibration reducer. Enlarge image. | |
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