OAK RIDGE, Tenn., - Supercomputers provide researchers with powerful tools, but operating them can also be a super hassle, says an Oak Ridge National Laboratory researcher who heads a team working to fix the problem.
Through a $15 million five-year project, ORNL and a team from universities and other Department of Energy laboratories will create the Scalable Systems Software Center. The center, funded through DOEs Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing initiative, will address the lack of software for effective management of terascale computational resources like the ones being installed at ORNL and other sites around the country.
"DOE operates many of the largest computers in the world and some of the largest computer centers," said Al Geist of ORNLs Computer Science and Mathematics Division. "But today, each computer center uses ad hoc and homegrown systems software solutions to, for example, schedule jobs and monitor the health of the supercomputers."
With the center, problems solved at one DOE computer center could be leveraged to other centers.
"The Scalable Systems Software Center provides the opportunity to create and support a common set of systems software for large computer centers across the country," Geist said. "Its a problem that the computer industry isnt going to solve because business trends push the industry toward smaller systems aimed at Web serving, database farms and departmental-sized systems."
The vision and goal of the center are to bring together a team of experts who, with industry involvement, can agree on and specify standardized interfaces between system components. Another goal is to produce a fully integrated set of systems software and tools to effectively use terascale computational resources.
Researchers also plan to study and develop more advanced versions of the system tools to meet the needs of future and even larger -- supercomputers.
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Contact: Ron Walli
wallira@ornl.gov
865-576-0226
DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory
6-Sep-2001