STARKVILLE, MS-MPI Software Technology, Inc. (MSTI) is pleased to announce that the new "supercluster" at the Engineering Research Center (ERC) at Mississippi State University is utilizing its high-performance software. The 165 node cluster is composed of SGI 1100 compute nodes, each with dual 1 GHz Intel Pentium® III processors and 1 GB of RAM. A dual processor SGI 1200 is used as a head node, which brings the total size of the cluster to 330 processors with 165 GB of RAM. The cluster runs the Red Hat® Linux operating system and is connected via fast ethernet switches with gigabit ethernet uplinks. It runs MPI/Pro® for Linux, a product of MSTI. MPI/Pro is a commercial-grade implementation of the MPI (Message Passing Interface) standard. MPI defines how information is transferred among multiple processors all working together on related programs. MPI/Pro improves the performance of parallel jobs on clusters running applications such as CFD (computational fluid dynamics), weather modeling, and seismic exploration. The cluster is used to run CFD applications in the Computational Simulation and Design Center at the ERC.
Mississippi State University has a long history in cluster computing. MSU built its first cluster in 1987 and this is the fifth generation cluster built on that legacy.
The cluster has a theoretical peak performance of 329.6 Gigaflops. The June 2001 Top500 Supercomputer Sites list published at the 16th International Supercomputer Conference in Heidelburg, Germany, lists the cluster as the 158th most powerful computer in the world, and the 13th most powerful academic system in the U.S.
"We chose MPI/Pro for Linux for our performance benchmarking because it yielded better performance than other MPI products that we tested," said Roger Smith of the ERC. "The engineers at MSTI were also willing to work closely with us to overcome technical issues that were common to all of the implementations of MPI that we evaluated. We were so pleased with all aspects of the performance of MPI/Pro and the engineering and development teams behind it that we not only chose to implement it as the production version of MPI on this cluster, we are making plans to implement it on other platforms as well."
Dr. Anthony Skjellum, President and CEO of MSTI added, "There is no substitute for software scalability, robustness and modern middleware design when it comes to terascale clustering. We designed MPI/Pro to enable production cluster computing that doesn't break or fall apart. We're proud to have MSU/ERC choose MPI/Pro as their key scalability vehicle for their leading CFD R&D."
MSTI is a pre-IPO, high technology company headquartered in Starkville, MS. MSTI got its start as a spin-off of high-performance computing research conducted at Mississippi State University by Dr. Anthony Skjellum. The company continues to have a close working relationship with the University. Founded in 1996, with employees throughout the U.S. and Europe, MSTI provides leading solutions for messaging middleware on cluster systems and embedded computers; the company also supports high performance mathematical libraries for embedded systems. For more information, please visit the company web site: www.mpi-softtech.com .
The Mississippi State University Engineering Research Center was established in 1990 as a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center for Computational Field Simulation. Its mission is to enhance the global competitiveness of U.S. industry by reducing the time and cost of performing complex field simulations for engineering analysis, design, and certicfication in such application areas as marine, automotive, aerospace, and propulsion systems. For more information, please visit the ERC's website: www.erc.msstate.edu.