Supercomputing on demand to answer emergency calls

Giving emergency first responders, scientists and the general public a real-time measurement of disasters or emergencies as well as near real-time predictions of the path of tornados or hurricanes or to foretell the most likely direction of a toxic plume released by an industrial accident or terrorist incident — are all purview of a service rolled out this week courtesy of The National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded Supercomputing Center (SDSC) at the University of California San Diego.For example, within 30 minutes following a magnitude 3.5 or greater earthquake, researchers can have animated clips showing in graphical form the full impact of the quake, including depths and energy, the center said in a release. As data is recorded by the thousands of automated sensors, it automatically feeds into the computer model. In about half an hour, this tool can provide concise, visual answers about what happened.SDSC’s OnDemand service marks the first time an allocated NSF-funded TeraGrid, a computing grid linking some of the nation’s largest supercomputer centers will support on-demand users for urgent science applications. The system is already in operation and formal allocations of time for the OnDemand system will begin in October.OnDemand is a Dell cluster with 64 Intel dual-socket, dual-core compute nodes for a total of 256 processors. The 2.33 GHz, 4-way nodes have 8 GB of memory. The system, which has a nominal theoretical peak performance of 2.4 Tflops, is running the SDSC-developed Rocks open-source Linux cluster operation software and has the IBRIX parallel file system. Jobs are scheduled by the Sun Grid Engine. “SDSC’s OnDemand enables some of the TeraGrid’s significant resources to be made available in quick response mode during an emergency,” said Jose Munoz, deputy director of NSF’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure said in a statement. “Now researchers and the general public may have the more timely benefit of advances made in research in areas such as earthquakes, tornadoes and hurricanes, and provide earlier and more thorough and accurate assessments when these natural disasters strike.”The system hums along as normal in between emergency need, the center says. Under normal operations, a batch of jobs is maintained constantly at the ready, often consisting of more than 1,000 jobs waiting to be processed. As soon as a safety concern arises, be it natural, biological or radiological, pre-determined jobs are immediately scheduled. This results in the center allocating for emergency resources ahead of otherwise scheduled batch jobs.In 2006 researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago demonstrated a new specialized software system that provides computational resources quickly for emergency applications affecting public health, safety and security. This new system, called SPRUCE (Special PRiority and Urgent Computing Environment), supports urgent computing on both traditional supercomputers and distributed computational Grids.