A supercomputer named after a couple of hosers is ready to take off at U of T.
McKenzie, named after the iconic Canadian duo, has 256 two-processor motherboards that together perform 1.2 trillion floating-point operations per second.
To put this in perspective, if you could borrow the brains of your neighbours for a second, you’d need to get each of the 5 million residents of the GTA to compute 240,000 calculations per second to keep pace with the supercomputer.
This new 512-processor cluster here at U of T now tops the computing power of the High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory housed at Queen’s University. And while the HPCVL supports research in a variety of disciplines from psychology to engineering, this cluster is entirely dedicated to astrophysics. It will tackle some of the most complex problems in astronomy today, like galaxy mergers, black hole accretion, and the production of the cosmic microwave background after the earliest stages of the formation of the universe.
Researchers in the department of astronomy and astrophysics and the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) are already making full use of the cluster. Supplied by Montreal-based company Mynix Technology, McKenzie set-up went smoothly last month.
One of the early users of the cluster is galaxy dynamicist John Dubinski, assistant professor in the department of astronomy and astrophysics. Realistic galaxy simulations are difficult because a typical galaxy contains more than one billion stars, not to mention the dark matter that makes up 90 per cent of a galaxy’s mass. A challenge like this is best left to clusters of machines, which can process the calculations in parallel. Dubinski will be continuing his galaxy collision simulations on McKenzie, some of which were featured in a recent issue of National Geographic.
Ue-Li Pen, assistant professor at CITA, is working on modeling the swirling gas disks accreting on supermassive black holes in the centres of galaxies. Pen, who has been involved in the set-up of the machine, speculates that McKenzie will top the list in Canada for a few years before being surpassed. However, the high-energy group in the department of physics is planning its own supercomputer. Might that cluster top the astrophysics one? In a sense, it will do even better. “We are considering joining these into one big cluster,” Pen says of his McLennan Labs neighbours.
While you might imagine that a supercomputer’s powers would make research orders of magnitude easier, Pen says not everyone is poised to take advantage of such a machine. “What really limits the use is the difficulty of programming it,” says Pen.
Pen encourages undergraduates interested in work on high-performance computing to contact CITA. Students with backgrounds in physics or computer science may be able to conduct research through summer positions at CITA. Graduate students working at CITA or astronomy and astrophysics also have access to McKenzie.
The cluster was acquired with funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation program with a one-to-one matching contribution from the Ontario Innovation Trust.
As Bob and Doug McKenzie would say, “Way to go, eh?”
