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John Matrow, system administrator and trainer with the High Performance Computing Center, stands next to WSU's newest supercomputer that is faster, bigger and better than the one purchased a few years ago. WSU's HiPeCC has more than 130 users, who run large-scale numerical computations.

Its components have mythological names, but what it means to WSU is no myth.

In July, WSU's High Performance Computing Center installed a $500,000-plus supercomputer that is faster, bigger and better than the supercomputer it's had since 1999. Supercomputers are used for large-scale numerical computing.

At WSU more than 130 faculty members, research associates, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows use the HiPeCC.

Each of the 100 processors in the new supercomputer is seven times faster than the 24 processors in the older model, according to HiPeCC director David Alexander, who named the first supercomputer Hydra, after a star constellation and the multi-headed serpent in Greek mythology. Alexander is an astronomer.

"When we bought Hydra, it was the fastest machine in Kansas at the time," he says.

The fact that Hydra was running at capacity within six months of installation and sometimes exceeded capacity during the past four years indicated a bigger supercomputer was desperately needed.

"We've basically outgrown Hydra. Hydra was seriously saturated and the consequence of that has been that our faculty and students haven't been able to pursue the front-line, cutting-edge problems that they really wanted to work on," Alexander says. "It's obviously very frustrating for a faculty member to have this idea of how to solve a problem and not have the tools to do it. What the new machine does is turn our people loose."

Hydra will remain online until its components "die gracefully," Alexander says. WSU didn't renew its annual $35,000 maintenance contract on the aging machine.

Working with Silicon Graphics, Alexander and John Matrow, HiPeCC system administrator and trainer, customized the new supercomputer to include two kinds of processors: the super-fast and super-efficient, but more expensive, 64-bit processors for large-scale complex projects, and 32-bit processors, for smaller projects. It's the equivalent of having a car with two speeds, one for intensive challenges and the other for everyday driving.

Like Hydra, the components of the new supercluster have been named after mythological characters. The front-end computer that routes jobs is Cronos, the father of the Greek god Zeus. The 32 64-bit processors are named Zeus, who was considered the chief god in Greek mythology. The two clusters of 34 32-bit processors are Apollo and Artemis, Zeus' children.

The computer's storage system has 1,000 gigabytes of disk space, three times what Hydra had, and there is room for expansion.

Among the HiPeCC users is physics professor Elizabeth Behrman, who is mapping how quantum computing could one day bring about computers up to a million times faster than any current computer. Chemist Robert Carper is investigating the molecular structure of ionized liquids, which is important for many manufacturing industries. Vis Madhavan from industrial and manufacturing engineering has a number of projects using finite element modeling for materials processing.

Alexander stresses that the HiPeCC is available to any WSU faculty or staff member. The fact that it serves the entire campus helped WSU garner two grants of more than $560,000 from the National Science Foundation to help pay for the computer.

"The university's High Performance Computing Center is quickly developing a national profile as a model for successful campus-wide shared computing, as reflected in its ever-increasing government and related funding," says Juli Nash Moultray, SGI sciences market manager.

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