Computer Resources

The MAIDROC computing laboratory at FIU is equipped with a secure network consisting of one SGI R10000 workstation, six 3.0GHz PCs, two laser printers and a high intensity projector for PowerPoint presentations. The centerpiece of the MAIDROC Lab is the new 128-processor parallel computer. The parallel machine uses a variant of MPI and Linux operating system. The MAIDROC cluster was designed, assembled, and tuned in January of 2004. This machine is composed of 48 nodes that were assembled and tested by Alienware. Each node has a Tyan S2882G3NR (Thunder SK8) motherboard with two AMD Opteron 1.6 GHz CPU's, 80 GB ATA IDE Seagate hard drive and 1GB Registered ECC DDR PC-2700 RAM. Each of the nodes has an Intel® 82551QM 10/100 fast Ethernet controller and two Broadcom® BCM5704C Gigabit Ethernet controllers. Two Dell PowerConnect 5224 24-port Gigabit Ethernet switches and one HP ProCurve 5400zl 72-port switch are used to connect the nodes. The ProCurve switch features a 76.8 Gbps switching fabric. All communication within the cluster is on a 1 Gbps network. The Linux operating system (RedHat Taroon 64-bit beta) is used on all nodes. We are currently running kernel 2.4.21-4 compiled for a 64-bit SMP. The MPI message passing library LAM 7.0.4 and 64-bit Portland Group compilers are currently used for all MPI programs. A dual 2.4 GHz Xeon processor based PC is used as the NFS server and DQS queue master. This cluster has a peak performance of more than 288 Gigaflops/sec. However, the largest measured sustained speed achieved was 112 Gigaflops/sec using the high performance Linpack benchmark on 48 processors over the Gigabit network.

 

MAIDROC is located in a suite of three offices (EC2710, EC2712, EC2714) amounting to 1,350 sq ft of floor space. One of the small offices was completely remodeled and adapted to house the 128-processor parallel computer, its switches, control computer, a display panel, two wall windows, electrical outlets, emergency power units, fuse boxes, and an auxiliary cooling unit located above this room. The second small room can house either a visiting scientist or additional computing equipment.

 

Members of the MAIDROC are currently using this computing platform to perform large-scale analysis, inverse design and optimization on federally funded projects involving materials science, penetration mechanics, and optimization algorithm development.

 

 

Multidisciplinary Analysis, Inverse Design,

Robust Optimization and Control Laboratory