NSF Research Infrastructure Initiative Grant

University of Maryland, Department of Computer Science and UMIACS

Through an NSF RII grant, the University of Maryland has acquired an IBM SP2 and a cluster of Digital Alpha workstations, for use by researchers in the Department of Computer Science and the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS).

The IBM SP2 is configured with:

• 16 processor nodes (each an RS/6000 Model 570) - 64MB memory per processor
• more than 12GB secondary storage per processor - configured on two Fast Wide SCSI busses (max. 20MB/sec bandwidth), each with 3 ~2GB disk drives (each drive with a minimum sustained bandwidth of 8 MB/sec) - providing a total of over 200GB secondary storage
• High Performance Switch - a fast multi-stage interconnection network for interprocessor communication

The Digital Alpha cluster is configured with:

• 10 4-processor Sable nodes - a node consists of four 275 MHz Alpha processors with 256MB of shared memory
• 4GB secondary storage per node - to be upgraded to ~10 GB per node
• Digital ATM Gigaswitch - for high bandwidth interprocessor communication (this will arrive summer 1995, in the interim the interconnection is through a Digital FDDI switch)

Tertiary storage is provided by:

• a Digital-supplied Odetics tape robot - 3 1.5MB/sec digital linear tape (DLT) drives, served by a tape farm of up to 250 10GB DLT tapes

Many research projects are using the equipment, including:

• NSF Grand Challenge Project in Land Cover Dynamics
• CHAOS Project: Systems Software for Irregular Problems
• Parallel Understanding Systems (PLUS) Group
• Numerical Analysis projects
• High Performance File Systems

Problems to: