RCAC Innovations
'Robbie the Robot' making data easier to mine
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – A new resident of the Math Sciences Building is supporting the sophisticated data-storage needs of researchers at Purdue University and helping to establish the institution among the nation’s supercomputing elite.
"Robbie the Robot," named for the mechanical star of the 1950s sci-fi classic "Forbidden Planet," is a cutting-edge, automated storage and retrieval system that will enable vast amounts of data to be seamlessly archived and quickly located for researchers' use.
The $1 million robot system has the capacity to store up to 1 petabyte of data.
"To put this in context, one petabyte equals 1,000 terabytes," says Dwight McKay, director of systems engineering with Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP). "The U.S. Library of Congress contains approximately 10 terabytes of data, and our capacity is about 100 times that amount.
"That is substantial considering all the Internet content in existence is estimated to be 8 petabytes. This system brings Purdue up to the kind of data storage that other large, high-performance computing centers have."
This initiative is part of ITaP's ongoing efforts to upgrade high-performance computing capabilities.
"We've been actively expanding our resources to attract researchers to Purdue, and this robot system is one of the tools to help us become competitive at the national level of supercomputing," McKay says.
This is especially needed to support the new Cyber Center for supercomputing that was announced last summer as part of Discovery Park, the university's multidisciplinary research center.
"Researchers are coming to Purdue and bringing their very large data sets with them," says Mike Marsh, senior engineer in the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing. "With this system, we have the ability to capture that data in our library and have it automatically available to them, and that's a big advantage."
Full story: http://news.uns.purdue.edu/html3month/2005/051206.McKay.petabyte.html
Scientists and engineers simulate jet colliding with World Trade Center
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Researchers at Purdue University have created a simulation that uses scientific principles to study in detail what likely happened when a commercial airliner crashed into the World Trade Center's North Tower on Sept. 11, 2001.
The simulation could be used to better understand which elements in the building's structural core were affected, how they responded to the initial shock of the aircraft collision, and how the tower later collapsed from the ensuing fire fed by an estimated 10,000 gallons of jet fuel, said Mete Sozen, the Kettelhut Distinguished Professor of Structural Engineering in Purdue's School of Civil Engineering.
It took about 80 hours using a high-performance computer containing 16 processors to produce the first simulation, which depicts how the plane tore through several stories of the structure within a half-second, said Christoph M. Hoffmann, a professor of computer science and co-director of the Computing Research Institute at Purdue.
"This required a tremendous amount of detailed work," Hoffmann said. "We have finished the first part of the simulation showing what happened to the structure during the initial impact. In the coming months, we will explore how the structure reacted to the extreme heat from the blaze that led to the building's collapse, and we will refine the visual presentations of the simulation."
The researchers are analyzing how many columns were destroyed initially in the building's core, a spine of 47 heavy steel I-beams extending through the center of the structure, Sozen said.
"Current findings from the simulation have identified the destruction of 11 columns on the 94th floor, 10 columns on the 95th floor and nine columns on the 96th floor," he said. "This is a major insight. When you lose close to 25 percent of your columns at a given level, the building is significantly weakened and vulnerable to collapse."
The simulation research, funded by the National Science Foundation, was carried out by a team that includes Hoffmann; Sozen; Ayhan Irfanoglu, an assistant professor of civil engineering; Voicu Popescu, an assistant professor of computer science; computer science doctoral student Paul Rosen; and civil engineering doctoral students Oscar Ardila and Ingo Brachmann.
Full story: http://news.uns.purdue.edu/html4ever/2006/060911.Sozen.WTC.htm
Computer recycling system has educational, cost benefits
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Purdue University has developed a system that gives computers purchased for instructional labs across campus a couple of lives the machines ordinarily wouldn't have, saving money and providing valuable teaching tools in the process.
"This program is using the state's funds very effectively," said Jeff Evans, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering technology. "That's the beauty of it — the money for the computers has already been spent, and what we are doing is basically using the machines until they break to the point where we can no longer repair them."
This system, which has been in use for about a year, was developed in collaboration with Purdue's Rosen Center for Advanced Computing. The process allows computers that are about six or seven years old — too obsolete for faculty and students to use for complex scientific research — to be collected for electrical and computer engineering technology students to practice software and hardware installation, benchmarking, troubleshooting and maintenance in the emerging area of high-performance computing.
As a result of the students' work, the high-performance computer the students continually work on benefits researchers across disciplines who need computing power to perform large tasks.
Evans said this system of using recycled computers for a high-performance computing teaching lab is the first of its kind at Purdue and that there are very few such systems of this scale in place around the country.
In addition to saving money, students also benefit. The undergraduate students involved are part of Evans' "Electrical and Computer Engineering Technology 325" class, which has been offered for about a year on the West Lafayette campus and was expanded this fall to the College of Technology's statewide location in South Bend. The students there are able to link to the same supercomputing system used by students in West Lafayette.
A portion of the class exposes students to the area of high-performance computing, which Evans describes as the process of linking standard PCs together to form a Linux cluster (a group of linked computers that work together to operate as a single computer), creating a supercomputer that is able to perform complex tasks better and much more efficiently than in the past.
"These formerly unrelated computers are linked together to act and be maintained as one," Evans said. "The result is that tasks and research that would have been difficult or impossible in the past are now possible. High-performance computing allows a task that would have taken years in the past to be performed in just hours."
This computer recycling system is an extension of a similar effort that has been going on for about four years at Information Technology at Purdue's Rosen Center, which supports large-scale scientific computing and storage for the Purdue research community.
Full story: http://news.uns.purdue.edu/html3month/2006/060906.Evans.computers.html
Data collection begins on satellite observatory project's latest phase
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — The second phase of a Purdue University project that will collect data via satellite to make it easier for scientists to research everything from making our food safer to increasing the accuracy of weather forecasts debuted earlier this month.
The applied research from the Purdue Terrestrial Observatory, a real-time satellite remote sensing receiving station, will be used to develop initiatives directed toward homeland security, the environment and ecology, meteorology and climatology, and economic development.
The observatory is operated by the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing, which is part of Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP). The Rosen Center, through its role in the grid-computing project TeraGrid, provides advanced computing resources and services to support computationally intensive research nationwide. It also operates the Envision Center for Data Perceptualization at Purdue.
The first phase of the Purdue Terrestrial Observatory project began operating 15 months ago and receives satellite imagery 24 hours a day, said observatory director Gilbert Rochon.
The initial ground station established in Phase I contains a 3.7-meter geostationary operational environmental satellite receiving station dish located in the communications "dish farm" on campus, said Rochon, who also is associate vice president for collaborative research and chief scientist at the Rosen Center.
"It's a geostationary meteorological station. The satellites are in sync with the Earth's orbit, so the dish itself doesn't move," he said.
The observatory's Phase II includes a tower-mounted tracking ground station with a 30-foot tower located near the Purdue Airport. On top is a 4.5-meter dish that tracks satellites as they orbit the Earth.
"Phase II offers more and higher-level applications — not just meteorology," Rochon said. "The dish activates when directed by a software-generated schedule and tracks when it senses one of the designated satellites in orbit a mere one degree above the horizon and will track that satellite all the way until it clears the horizon."
The powerful Phase II equipment is capturing real-time, remotely sensed data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's AVHRR satellite (advanced very high resolution radiometer); NASA's polar-orbiting Terra and Aqua MODIS (moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer sensors), and also is collecting data from the Chinese Space Agency's Feng Yun (wind and cloud) satellite, Rochon said.
Full story: http://news.uns.purdue.edu/html3month/2006/060616.Rochon.observe.html
Climate model forecasts dramatic changes in U.S.
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - The most comprehensive climate model to date of the continental United States predicts higher temperatures for the Northeast over the next century and drier and hotter conditions for the desert Southwest.
The climate model, developed at Purdue University, considers many factors neglected in past studies, such as the effects of snow reflecting sunlight back into space and of high mountain ranges blocking weather fronts from traveling across them.
Team scientist Noah S. Diffenbaugh said a better understanding of these factors Ñ coupled with a more powerful computer system on which to run the analysis Ñ allowed the team to generate a far more coherent image of what weather we can expect in the continental 48 United States this century.
Those expectations, he said, paint a very different climate picture for most parts of the country.
"This is the most detailed projection of climate change that we have for the U.S.," said Diffenbaugh, an assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences in Purdue's College of Science and a member of the Purdue Climate Change Research Center. "And the changes our model predicts are large enough to substantially disrupt our economy and infrastructure."
The research team also includes Diffenbaugh's Purdue colleague Robert J. Trapp, as well as Jeremy S. Pal and Filippo Giorgi of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy. Their paper appears in today's (Monday, Oct. 17) online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Full story: http://news.uns.purdue.edu/html4ever/2005/051017.Diffenbaugh.model.html