High Performance Computing
Lab in CSSE
By Saifut Tariq Khan, CSSE Department, office P4-005 - Tel: 278.
As a significant step towards enabling research and achieving a standard on par with other undergraduate institutions offering degrees in computer science, the CSSE department has setup a High Performance Computing Lab.
The High Performance
Computing Lab consists of six machines connected via a very high-speed
network, with bandwidth of 1 Gigabits per second (Gbps). Each machine has
two 2.4 Giga Hertz (Ghz) CPUs or processors, with 1 Gigabyte of physical or
main memory. The total Disk storage capacity of the cluster is about 240
Gigabytes (GB). Thus, the cluster as a whole has 12-2.4
Ghz processors, 6 GB of main memory and 240 GB of storage.
What’s a Giga? Here’s what each of these mean:
|
1 GHz |
1 billion cycles per second |
In the time it takes to execute an instruction light would travel only 1.5 meters |
|
1 MB |
1 million bytes |
About the size of a 600 page novel |
|
1 byte |
Amount of electronic storage needed to store 1 character |
Each English alphabet requires 1 byte |
|
1 GB |
A little more than 1 billion bytes |
Hard copy version of Encyclopedia Britannica can fit in, with room to spare |
|
1 Gbps |
A little more than 1 billion bits per second (Or more than 134 million bytes per second) |
A 60 minute video can be zipped across in 1 second |
The kind of applications best suited to run on the cluster are: Computational Linguistics, In-Memory Databases, Data Mining, Information Retrieval, Neural Networks, Simulation and Modeling, Very Large Matrix and Sparse Matrix Operations, and Fluid Dynamics to name just a few.
___________________________________________________________________
If you have any questions please contact Saifut Khan in the CSSE Department in his office P4-005 or at extension 278.