Ravana is a resource acquired by the College of Science and Mathematics
and is available to researchers in all its constituent departments. The
name is
that
of a ten-headed demon king who was a central figure in the Hindu epic,
the Ramayana.
The actual machine has many more heads and is a 64-bit, 128-processor (specifically 64 dual-core)
Beowulf cluster
with infiniband connectivity. Some of the compute nodes have 8GB RAM
while most have
4GB with raid-configured storage exceeding 1.5TB. The machine is housed
in a newly redesigned Data Center which meets its backup power and
cooling needs.
Representative applications include quantum measurement
and control
simulations in the context of nanomechanical and other mesoscale
applications
(physics), molecular
and reaction dynamics (chemistry), ocean scale fluid dynamics (eeos),
and bioinformatics and other data mining applications (physics,
biology,
mathematics and
computer science).
Courses and seminars designed to facilitate code
design and adaptation
to the parallel environment will also be developed. In this context, a
pair of Sun
Enterprise servers, currently in storage on campus, could be used as a
supplementary
32-processor parallel environment for training and code development. |
