1. The Texas Advanced Computing Center: Developing a Scientific Computing Curriculum
Jay Boisseau, Director
Texas Advanced Computing Center
The University of Texas at Austin
March 4, 2010

2. Why is Computing is So Important in Science!
“Computers are incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination.”
– Albert Einstein

3. TACC Mission
To enable discoveries that advance science and society through the application of advanced computing technologies.

4. TACC’s Vision
Provide the most powerful, capable computing technologies and techniques that enable people— researchers, educators, developers, engineers, businessmen, etc.—to advance science and society.
Provide leadership in the advanced computing community in technology R&D, support, education, and expertise to ensure maximum impact of current and future technologies in diverse applications.
Enable transformational science and societal achievements that change, influence, and improve our understanding of the world, and the world itself.

5. We Know It’s About the Physics…
[Courtesy of San Diego Supercomputer Center]

6. But Now It’s Also about the Data!
Vastly more powerful instruments and computers have led to an explosion of new data.
Modern science and engineering therefore is about managing and analyzing this data as well.

7. Computing & Science
Over the past 60+ years, computers have become the most important general-purpose instrument of science.
every field of science is using computational resources and techniques to complement theory and observations
percentage of research using computing continues to climb
Many challenging problems require tremendously powerful computers for problem size, solution speed.
simulation-driven science requiring solutions of differential equations in 3D space for huge numbers of timesteps
data-driven science requiring statistical, search, and other analysis techniques on vast data

8. Ranger: World-Class Supercomputing Capability

9. Ranger System Summary Peak Performance – 579.4 Teraflops
3,936 Sun four-socket blades
15,744 AMD “Barcelona” processors
Quad-core, four flops/clock cycle
62,976 total processor cores
Total Memory Terabytes
2 GB/core, 32 GB/node
123 TB/s aggregate bandwidth
Interconnect – 1 GB/s, sec latency
Sun Data Center Switches (2), InfiniBand, up to x ports each
Full non-blocking 7-stage fabric
7.8 TB/s backplane
Mellanox ConnectX InfiniBand HCAs 9

10. Massive Computing Requires Massive Data Storage: Meet Corral!
1.2 petabytes of disk storage
DataDirect disk
8 Dell 1950 and 8 Dell 2950 servers
Multiple ways to access data
Web
Databases
File system
iRODS

11. TACC Is a World Leader in Visualization, Too!
Quantum Chemistry
GeoSciences
Natural Convection
Gravity Map
Bioinformatics
Orbital Debris
Turbulent Flow
CT Models

12. Remote Visualization
STAR Partner Aramco Services Company is running VisIt software from Saudi Arabia, using seismic data computed on Ranger.
“Visualizing the results right where the data is generated speeds up research considerably.”

13. Stallion - Highest Resolution Display Environment in the World

14. TACC “XD Vis” Resource: Longhorn
NSF “XD Visualization” award to TACC for $7M to
Deploy world-class visualization services for US open science
Provide advanced support for 3 years
Longhorn specs
256 Dell Quad-core Intel Nehalem Nodes (8 cores/nodes, 2048 total cores)
240 thin nodes (48GB), 16 fat nodes (144GB)
~14.5 TB aggregate memory
2 Nvidia GPUs/node (512 total GPUs)
QDR InfiniBand Interconnect
10G connection to Ranger’s 1 PB Lustre Parallel File System
Local Lustre disk space – 195 TB (150 TB useable)
Node local disk space – 40G
Jobs launched through SGE

15. So Why is TACC Teaching Classes?
In the 90s, CS curricula changed: the tech industry influenced the programming language focus but also in topics focus
But the importance of computing to science and engineering didn’t change—it also grew
We’ve had years of reduced focused in CS curricula on scientific computing, overlapping with the onset of massive parallelism

16. TACC’s Comprehensive Classes
Intro to Scientific Programming
Scientific/Technical Computing
Parallel Computing for Science & Engineering
Visualization & Data Analysis for Science & Engineering
Distributed & Grid Computing for Science & Engineering
Will probably become Distributed, Grid & Cloud Computing

17. Challenges Remain Still don’t have a scientific computing department
But do have a graduate computational science degree plan and an undergrad certificate now
Must still put materials in form to be distributed, and to record and broadcast
Thank you, Chevron!
Must find time for staff to constantly update the materials—currently a volunteer effort!

18. Summary
Advanced computing techniques more important than ever: in science, engineering, and beyond.
Computing curricula changed in the 90’s due to growth of computing sales to business, consumers.
TACC has developed a comprehensive scientific computing curriculum to prepare students for both research and industry careers.
We have a long way to go towards addressing the tremendous need for more technical computing education, but things are changing.

19. Please feel free to contact me with any questions or suggestions: boisseau@tacc.utexas.edu