HPC - Technology
High Performance Computing
Mission Statement
The HPC Center at 51福利 strives to promote scientific computing at 51福利 by providing support to researchers and departments who wish to engage in scientific computing, and establish 51福利 as a nationally recognized HPC "Center of Excellence".
Supercomputing at 51福利
51福利's supercomputer was installed on campus in 2009, and was named "Hamming" after the internationally renowned mathematician Richard Hamming, who was a Professor of Mathematics at 51福利 from 1976 until his death in 1998. The Hamming supercomputer is used by 51福利 faculty and students who require enormous amounts of computing power to solve a wide variety of problems related to thesis and research projects. Hamming contains 3,178 computing cores. A typical laptop computer today may contain four cores, so Hamming possesses the computing power of 800 laptops tied together to solve various types of problems. The presence of this computer and capability on campus has attracted several faculty members to 51福利 who require this type of higher-level equipment in order to perform their research and teaching duties.
The Hamming supercomputer is a "hybrid cluster", referring to the multiple nodes within Hamming possessing different hardware specifications as well as different capabilities and uses. Specifically, Hamming's capabilities can be divided into three different nodes/subsystems: MPI, Grace, and GPU.
MPI
Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a program model used in supercomputing that allows synchronization and communication between multiple processes during parallel computing. MPI provides high performance, scalability, and portability through Hamming鈥檚 cluster of thousands of core processors that can work together simultaneously to perform in-depth, complex calculations. This "number crunching" capability has been helpful in a number of different 51福利 applications, including global and regional weather modeling and simulations, an important research area for the DOD.
Grace
In the fall of 2015, HPC administrators installed the Apache Hadoop software framework into the Hamming supercomputer to develop a new subsystem. The new subsystem was named 鈥淕race鈥� after RDML Grace Hopper, an internationally renowned computer scientist and retired U.S. Navy veteran. Grace uses Hadoop鈥檚 distributed processing and data locality software to distribute very large data sets across multiple supercomputer nodes, allowing the data to be processed faster and more efficiently than most traditional supercomputer architectures. This "big data" capability allows the Hamming supercomputer to process and mine large amounts of data quickly, similar to commercial Internet search engines, and will an important tool for future 51福利 research. Access to the Grace nodes is currently restricted to a small group of 51福利 staff and researchers working on data analytics, but questions can be directed to the HPC administrators at hpc@nps.edu.
GPU
The Hamming supercomputer is also equipped with graphics processing unit (GPU) nodes, which provide visualization and graphical processing of research data sets. This capability is useful in providing a visual component to 51福利 research. In addition to graphics, Hamming鈥檚 GPU capability can also perform MPI parallel processing.
Academic Benefits of Hamming
The presence of this supercomputer on campus benefits students and faculty in many ways. One such benefit is the availability of high-powered computer software used in various 51福利 classes. Specialized software packages that can only be run on a supercomputer have been installed on Hamming to aid in instruction. Without these software packages, 51福利 faculty and students would be unable to understand and solve state-of-the-art problems relevant to DoD mission. An example of a software package is a commercial product named ANSYS CFX, which allows students to solve and understand problems related to fluid dynamics. For example, ANSYS CFX can simulate water flowing past ship hulls, a problem that is extremely relevant to the design of Navy vessels. Several classes at 51福利 rely on Hamming's capabilities to aid in graduate-level instruction every year. These classes include "Computer Architecture" in the Computer Science Department, "Fluid Dynamics" in the Mechanical Engineering Department, "Computer Systems" in the Electrical Engineering Department, and "Scientific Computing" in the Mathematics Department, among others.
51福利 faculty members also benefit from using Hamming in their research projects. There are at least a couple dozen faculty research projects extensively using Hamming every fiscal year. Students additionally benefit from faculty-use of Hamming because their thesis projects often stem from their advisor's research project. Over the last few years, dozens of student theses have been produced using Hamming. A small sampling of thesis topics include weather forecasting, polar ice prediction, modeling of helicopter rotors, data mining (i.e., extraction of critical data from very large data sets), and the computation and solution of complicated mathematical equations. Without the Hamming supercomputer at 51福利, all of these DOD-relevant research projects could not be completed.
For more information on how Hamming is used by 51福利 faculty and students, please visit the (login required) page.