TACC selects United Devices to develop massive campus grid for academic research.

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin (UT) and United Devices Inc. has announced a partnership that will significantly accelerate UT's academic computational research.

Through the partnership, TACC and United Devices will establish a campus-scale computing Grid at UT--the largest university in the United States--that will utilize United Devices' industry-leading Enterprise MetaProcessor software for harnessing the under-utilized cycles of computers running either Windows or Linux operating systems.

This campus Grid will enable applications that were previously relegated to dedicated computer systems to run much faster on hundreds, and eventually thousands, of computers in various departments and campus computer labs. Projects that require compute-intensive simulations will be completed much more rapidly, thereby having a tremendous impact on the progress of leading-edge research.

Historically, TACC has deployed tightly coupled parallel computing systems with tens to a few hundred processors connected by high-speed dedicated networks.

"The United Devices software will add a new dimension to TACC's high-end computing capabilities," said Jay Boisseau, director of TACC. "We are excited about offering this new kind of computational capability for the set of scientific applications that do not require high-bandwidth networks but do require thousands of processors."

"United Devices has a strong history of success in accelerating academic research through our market-leading grid solutions," said United Devices Director of Business Development and Strategic Relations, Piush Patel. "The combination of our secure, scalable grid technology with TACC's academic research leadership will accelerate innovation for UT and the broader market."

The United Devices software has already been deployed and is being configured to conduct several simulations. "Installation was trivial and bullet-proof, and the ongoing maintenance and operation of the UD software is equally easy," said Chris Hempel, associate director for advanced systems at TACC. "The United Devices grid solution will enable TACC to deploy a Grid that includes a much greater number of the computing systems at UT."

TACC and United Devices will train the UT IT staff to install and manage the United Devices software and will also train UT researchers to develop applications that run on the UT grid. Many campus researchers with important applications that will benefit from the speed and scope of this system have already been identified.

One such researcher is Doug Burger, assistant professor of computer sciences at UT, who said, "Our simulations evaluate the design space of future microprocessors and systems as circuits are scaled down to near-atomic levels. Due to the complexity of the devices, the size of the design space, and the heavy interactions between the low-level circuits and the programs running on them, the precision of these simulations is limited by the compute cycles available. The ability to harness the compute power of thousands of PCs across the UT campus will greatly improve our current research and will open new doors in the future."

TACC and United Devices also plan to explore research and development issues relating to computing on distributed compute Grids. Collaborative activities include extending the United Devices software to manage other Grid software packages, exploring new algorithms that utilize the UT Grid and pursuing joint application development.

"Our relationship with TACC confirms United Devices' leadership position in quickly and easily enabling third-party applications to run on our platform. The result is a catapult system for applications making their way from a leading research institution into the general market place," said United Devices Vice President of Marketing, Paul Kirchoff.

According to Mary Thomas, manager of the TACC Grid Computing Group, "It is crucial that grid technologies function in heterogeneous environments if they are to make the transition from theoretical ideas to real-world tools. The partnership between TACC and United Devices presents the opportunity for the development of reliable and useful software and furthers valuable joint academic-industrial research."