UNL supercomputers help research projects

HAL. Big Mac. PrairieFire.

Welcome to the supercomputer.

On Thursday night, roughly 15 students from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln gathered near the front entrance to Avery Hall.

It wasn't a meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery - instead, the students, all men, were waiting for a tour of UNL's supercomputer, PrairieFire.

Located at the Research Computing Facility on the third floor of the Miller and Paine building, 121 S. 13th St., PrairieFire is one of two supercomputers at UNL. The other, known simply as "Red," is located in the Walter Scott Engineering Center.

But what makes a supercomputer so extraordinary?

"Space. No, I'm kidding. Electricity. No, cooling," joked Cesar Delgado, a UNL graduate student in bioinformatics who works at the RCF. "It's just how much stuff you can do on it, basically."

Today, the difference between the average college student's laptop and a supercomputer comes down to storage.

When computers were still new, there was a big difference between the capabilities of the average computer compared with, say, a government computer.

"Nowadays, it's a very thin line," Delgado said in an interview Friday. "You can do a lot more when you have a whole bunch of them instead of just a laptop. That's why a supercomputer is important."

By "whole bunch of them," Delgado means 98. That's the number of computers, or "nodes," that form PrairieFire, which is referred to as a "cluster."

Unlike the enormous computers of ages past that required entire rooms, PrairieFire is quite small.

It consists of six 8-foot-tall racks filled with nodes, each about the size of a VCR player. The nodes are connected by strands of fiber optics, which Thursday's tour guide described as "really neat."

All those nodes means a lot of power, and both supercomputers have been used for some pretty super projects.

PrairieFire, for example, was used by UNL researchers to simulate the shock absorption of side rails for NASCAR racetracks.

It also aided researchers in discovering new atom configurations for both gold and ice.

And, for a while, it served as a tool for a graduate student whose thesis was to find the most efficient way to butcher a cow.

"So we had cows on our machine," Delgado said, "grazing on the prairie."

Red, however, will soon be involved with something even more ambitious: finding the key to civilization.

Red is part of an international particle physics project headed by CERN, situated near Geneva on the Franco-Swiss border. The world's largest particle physics laboratory, CERN is where the World Wide Web was created.

And right now, it's constructing a network of supercomputers to discover how the world was created.

"Particle physics requires vast amount of data and vast computing needs," said Carl Lundstedt, a grid systems manager with UNL's Department of Computer Science and Engineering.

CERN, therefore, has been distributing the computing to between 2,500 and 3,000 locations worldwide, including seven in the United States.

Aside from UNL, the other U.S. locations include Purdue University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, California Institute of Technology, the University of Wisconsin, the University of California-San Diego and the University of Florida.

"So we're basically peers with those intuitions, which I think puts us in pretty good company," Lundstedt said.

As for the project's goal, he described it as trying "to prove the very fundamental nature of the universe."

Sites are still under construction, and the project probably won't actually begin until the end of the year, he said.

But when it finally begins, "there's going to be data spewing all over," said Garhan Attebury, the systems administrator for RCF.

"I just want to see France, like, lose power when they turn on that thing," Delgado said with a laugh, adding that the resulting dataset will be one of the biggest ever produced.

"We only get a drop in the bucket, but it's more storage than the whole university put together, pretty much," he said. "They're looking for a particle that theory says should exist, but nobody's actually seen it."

UNL was chosen based on its excellent research computing reputation, in no small part due to the presence of PrairieFire; it may seem odd, then, that UNL isn't included in the prestigious ranking of supercomputers, known as the Top 500.

When PrairieFire was first installed in 2002, it debuted on the list between 100 and 200, but it later dropped off.

"We were in the fastest in the world, right?" Delgado said. "But since then, we kind of tapered off the edge."

It's hard to stay on the list, because the computers being built are increasingly powerful and fast.

However, plans to combine PrairieFire and Red some time in the future could change all that.

"We are actually fairly actively trying to get back on the list," Attebury said, and meshing the two together would probably do the trick.

Currently, both PrairieFire and Red are used mainly by research groups and UNL students and faculty members, but Lundstedt said they're working to expand their borders.