Research
Centers & Groups
Consortiums
ICES Reports
Facilities
The Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES) is located in the Applied Computational Engineering and Sciences (ACES) building on the University of Texas at Austin main campus. This facility has offices and work areas equipped with desktop computers, printers and copiers, mini-clusters, computational visualization facilities, and extensive network access for faculty, staff, students, and visitors. A large machine room houses supercomputers, servers, large scale storage devices, graphics engines, and audio visual support equipment. The building has a 196-seat auditorium with Ethernet ports at each seat. The auditorium also furnishes wireless networking, video conferencing and remote learning capabilities. There are eighteen networked seminar rooms with high-resolution audio visual systems, some with video conferencing and video taping facilities.
The ACES building networks are designed to support both bandwidth-intensive computational research and to accommodate new technology when available. The networks are built around high-performance, multilayer Cisco 6509, 2960 and 4003 network switches, with Lucent Gigaspeed copper Ethernet and Multimode Fiberoptic to each desktop and work area. The cabling also permits the exchange of video, audio, keyboard and mouse signals from the visualization clusters to any seminar room in the building. Wireless networking is available throughout the building and courtyard area.
The ICES workstation environment encompasses all offices, cubicles, work areas, and laboratories. Over 250 general-purpose workstations are available, including PCs running Linux and Windows, and Macs. Several color printers and scanners are available. File and email service is provided by a number of Linux servers with over twenty terabytes of disk storage and a mirrored disk-based backup. Other Mac and Linux-based computers function as web servers, LDAP authentication servers, domain name servers, directory servers, application servers, and compute servers.
ICES systems and networking team currently supports eight Linux-based Clusters with others in the planning and design stages. The Center for Subsurface Modeling has a 184 core cluster (Bevo2). The Center for Computational Visualization has a 64 core rendering cluster (Prism2). The Computational Fluid Dynamics Laboratory has a 32-node cluster (Bbrox). The Center for Computational Materials has a 16-node compute cluster (Deanston). The Center for Computational Molecular Sciences has two clusters - a 20-node (Holmes2) and a 40-node (Muskoka) cluster. The Center for Computational Life Sciences and Biology has a 184 core cluster (Junior). The Computational Mechanics Group has a 256 core cluster (Reynolds).
ICES has access to supercomputing facilities via high-speed networking at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the J. J. Pickle Research Center, eight miles north of the main campus. At TACC, the three primary HPC production systems include: a 96 processor IBM Power5 system with 730 Gflop/s peak computing capability and 192 GB of aggregate memory; a Dell Linux cluster, Lonestar, with 1460 dual-socket, dual core nodes giving it a 62 Tflop/s peak performance; and a Sun Constellation Linux cluster, Ranger, one of the most powerful computers for open academic research in the world. Ranger has 62,976 AMD Opteron processing cores, 123 TB of memory, 1.73 PB of on-line disk storage, and a peak performance of 579 Tflop/s.
The ACES Visualization Laboratory provides an end-to-end infrastructure for data-intensive and display-intensive computing and is available to all UTA investigators as well as UT System and Teragrid users. The lab includes a Dell visualization cluster, Stallion, with 24 nodes and a 15x5 - 307 megapixel tiled display, and a Sony 9M pixel flat projection system (Bronco) driven by a high-end Dell workstation. These systems provide a unique environment for interactive and immersive visual exploration. The laboratory is supported by multiple supercomputers that provide parallel data analysis and graphics rendering where digital data stream manipulation, storage and switching occur with maximum bandwidth.
Brief descriptions of each of the different sections and equipment comprising the Vislab are given below.
The Stallion cluster provides users with the ability to perform visualizations on a large 15 ft. x 5 ft. tiled display of Dell 30-inch flat panel monitors, for 307 megapixel resolution. This configuration allows for an exploration of visualizations at an extremely high level of detail and quality. The cluster allows users to access to over 36GB of graphics memory, 108GB of system memory, and 100 processing cores. This setup enables the processing of datasets of a massive scale, and the interactive visualization of substantial geometries. A large, shared file system is included in order to allow for the storage of terascale sized datasets.
The flat screen area on Bronco gives users a 20 ft. x 11 ft., 4096 x 2160 resolution display, which is driven by a Sony SRX-S105 overhead projector and a high-end Dell workstation. This configuration provides users with the added flexibility to run a wide variety of applications, as only one workstation is required to drive the display. The projector gives exceptional brightness and a high resolution, 9M pixel viewing area. In addition, Bronco may be configured to accept inputs from up to four simultaneous video sources, allowing for a hybrid display of multiple systems. As a result, the setting is ideal for both visualizations and presentations.
The collaboration room offers an opportunity for small groups to work together on developing and exploring visualizations. The display is provided by a single high-resolution projector which is driven by a high-end Dell workstation. Users may develop visualizations on the workstation, and then easily transition them to one of the two larger display systems in the main lab area at a later time.