Cyclops supercomputer makes public debut Oct. 6
The College of Engineering will introduce Cyclops, a new supercomputer purchased to support undergraduate research projects on Monday, Oct. 6 at noon in the Gunness Student Center.
The machine’s nickname comes from the fact that the supercomputer is an array of 608 linked processors but has only a single screen, like the one-eyed monster in ancient myths.
Each of the 608 processor cores in Cyclops can perform about 5 billion math operations per second (GFLOPS). “The 608 processor cores in Cyclops provide us with the ability to solve horrendously complex equation systems,” says Blair Perot, director of the Theoretical and Computational Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering.
“For example, this supercomputer could be used to calculate (via Newton’s first principal of motion) how much air will move through a jet engine, by solving an equation system with roughly 100 million unknowns.” Or, “in civil engineering, a similar calculation might track the motion of all the molecules near a small crack in the concrete of a bridge, to calculate the crack’s growth speed and direction, and predict the time before bridge failure occurs,” he adds.
Each processor on this machine has at least the computational capacity of all the humans in the world working together, since it takes an estimated three seconds for a human to perform a large multiplication operation. The $120,000 HPC Linux cluster supercomputer was purchased by Engineering dean Michael Malone from the Plymouth-based Microway Corp., owned by Ann Fried, who is expected to be on hand for the supercomputer’s introduction. Microway is one of the state’s oldest designers and manufacturers of high-density Linux clusters, workstations and InfiniBand network solutions.
In addition to helping undergraduates solve problems that require supercomputing capabilities, Malone says, Cyclops will provide a resource for graduate computational science courses and allow new faculty to start computational research before they obtain dedicated equipment for their own labs.
“Computers are changing every aspect of how engineering is being performed today,” Perot says. “Forward thinking investment by dean Malone keeps UMass Amherst at the leading edge of engineering research and education.”
October 1, 2008.
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