http://www.sgi.com/Headlines/1995/Mar/sgi-ncsa-evl.html (Einblicke ins Internet, 10/1995)
This pioneering collaboration delivers on a vision calling for a worldwide model for next-generation supercomputing environments, which was outlined by Edward R. McCracken, Silicon Graphics' chairman and chief executive officer, at the Supercomputing '94 conference. The integrated environment created through this collaboration will provide the NCSA and its industrial partners with access to the shared-memory, parallel-processing technology that offers the most economical path toward realizing an important NCSA goal - achieving a teraflop in sustained computational performance by the end of the decade.
"The NCSA's collaboration with Silicon Graphics will create an internationally prominent showcase for the interactive supercomputing environment of the future," said NCSA Director Larry Smarr. "Science is an inherently collaborative process. Currently, its essential components - the people and the computers - are restricted by time and location. Through this integration of supercomputing, high-speed networking and visualization technologies, scientists are able to see and interact with each other and their results, without physical distances imposing a barrier."As part of this project, Silicon Graphics will install at NCSA a 32-processor POWER CHALLENGEarray(tm) supercomputer, a distributed parallel processing system that can be expanded to include up to 144 64-bit MIPS(r) R8000(tm) RISC microprocessors. Targeted at solving problems of Grand Challenge magnitude, this system will be combined with an existing POWER CHALLENGE(tm) system with 16 processors to create a 48-processor POWER CHALLENGEarray supercomputing system. The resulting array will have a peak performance rating of over 14 billion floating point operations per second (GFLOPS) and will offer 8 gigabytes of memory.
This POWER CHALLENGEarray supercomputer will offer 10 times the computational power and 16 times the memory of the Cray Y-MP system that NCSA retired in December of last year. The POWER CHALLENGEarray will be made available to the NCSA user community this spring. NCSA currently has over 100 national academic and industrial projects running on its existing 16-processor POWER CHALLENGE.
Silicon Graphics will also install four POWER Onyx(tm) graphics supercomputers as part of the project, two at EVL and two at NCSA. These innovative collaborative facilities will be linked to the POWER CHALLENGEarray supercomputers, CAVE virtual reality environments, and classrooms throughout the NCSA and EVL. This NCSA/EVL facility will be a major testbed for national-scale deployment, using the December, 1995, I-WAY event at the Supercomputing '95 conference to demonstrate collaborative work teams at a variety of sites.
The first stage of this project will be to create the world's first geographically-distributed PowerWall, with local visualization to be driven by the two POWER Onyx systems at each site. The PowerWall, a human-scale interactive graphics visualization system, was first demonstrated by Silicon Graphics and the University of Minnesota at the Supercomputing '94 conference. The Chicago site, EVL, will be connected to the Urbana site, NCSA, 150 miles away, by the new NSF vBNS 155 Mbps network. These facilities will allow users to interact with each other and their visualized supercomputing results.
"The EVL's relationship with Silicon Graphics has already led to the development of visualization and virtual reality tools that have advanced scientific collaboration and interactive research," said EVL Director Thomas A. DeFanti. "This new collaboration will connect desktops, classrooms and virtual reality facilities to create a truly integrated supercomputing environment - one in which visualization is not an ancillary consideration, but a core capability."Silicon Graphics technology is a key part of NCSA's strategy to greatly lower the cost-performance of next-generation supercomputing environments based on shared-memory, microprocessor-based technology such as the POWER CHALLENGE systems. NCSA removed its last traditional vector supercomputer last year, and it has moved to systems based solely on microprocessor technology."Silicon Graphics' computational, visualization and interactive technologies have revolutionized collaboration in the workplace and created client/server `virtual enterprises' that are greatly enhancing productivity," said Forest Baskett, Silicon Graphics' chief technology officer and senior vice president of research and development. "NCSA and EVL, with their commitment to transferring this technology model to the high-performance computing arena, provide the perfect setting for the creation of a `whole' supercomputing environment that will represent a major new addition to the National Information Infrastructure."
NCSA, a unit of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is dedicated to advancing leading-edge technologies in information and high-performance computing and communications in academia and industry. The center receives major funding to support its research from the National Science Foundation, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, NASA, corporate partners, the State of Illinois and the University of Illinois.
The EVL at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) represents the oldest formal collaboration between engineering and art in the country offering graduate MFA, MS and/or PhD degrees in visualization. EVL is a joint effort of the UIC College of Engineering and UIC School of Art and Design. It collaborates with NCSA to further develop virtual reality as a scientific discovery and communications tool within the high-performance computing and communications community.
Silicon Graphics, Inc. is the leading manufacturer of high-performance visual computing systems. The company delivers interactive three-dimensional graphics, digital media and multiprocessing supercomputing technologies to technical, scientific and creative professionals. Its subsidiary, MIPS Technologies, Inc., designs and licenses the industry's leading RISC processor technology for the computer systems and embedded control markets. Silicon Graphics has offices worldwide and headquarters in Mountain View, California.
Silicon Graphics is a registered trademark, and POWER CHALLENGE, POWER CHALLENGEarray and POWER Onyx are trademarks of Silicon Graphics, Inc. MIPS is a registered trademark, and R8000 is a trademark, of MIPS Technologies, Inc.
