Group-Wide Initiatives
In addition to the intensive systems and software investigations carried out in GEaRS, this group also provides constant, group-wide initiatives throughout every academic year. The listing below summarizes some of those ongoing efforts.
Software Development, Collaboration and Consultation
User Support Enhancements
Lab-On-Wheels
Seminars-On-Demand
Software Development, Collaboration and Consultation
One of the important services that the GEaRS group provides to the University's research community is software development, collaboration, and consultation. This is a constant process, with many researchers being assisted weekly. The following, noted below, are a few highlighted examples of this effort.
- Worked with Dr. Charles Holland of the Applied Research Laboratory on parallelizing and porting acoustic simulations code to the GEaRS group systems
- Research collaboration with Dr. Yousry Azmy of the Department of Nuclear Engineering and Dr. Frank Pugh of the Department of Biochemistry on modeling and simulation of gene regulatory networks
- Research collaboration with Dr. Reka Albert of the Department of Physics and Dr. Costas D. Maranas of the Department of Chemical Engineering on modeling and analysis of large-scale biological networks
- Authored a VTK-based program to compute and display root-growth observational data in support of a NSF proposal by Dr. Marc Goebel of Department of Horticulture
- Authored a VTK-based program to author, compute and display large molecular dynamic simulations in stereo for Chuck Anderson in the Center for Environmental Kinetics Analysis
- Authored two OpenDX applications for Samrat Choudhury that process, classify and display crystalline phases for lead zirconate titanate in two and three dimensions, increasing computational efficiency by a factor of 30 over conventional techniques
User Support Enhancements
- User Guides
Many software packages are used to connect to and interact with the clusters managed by GEaRS. Some of those packages are obscure, while others have complicated install processes. The GEaRS group receives repeat questions from their users, and they have identified a suite of efficient tools users can employ. Member of this group created easy-to-follow guides that allow novice and advanced users to install, configure and maintain these packages on their systems. The group has received a large amount of positive feedback (from as far away as Germany) about how the user guides are a significant help to the research community. - Cluster Usage Accounting Web Pages
It is important for GEaRS' faculty partners to monitor their usage and their group members' usage of the systems in which they partner. To facilitate this, the GEaRS group created online Cluster Usage Accounting Web pages, where faculty partners can authenticate and view information such as the percent usage of their ownership share of a cluster, the usage of the cluster by individual members of their group, and the amount of time their jobs are waiting in queue.
Lab-on-Wheels
The Lab-on-Wheels provides a mobile teaching facility capable of being deployed quickly, easily, and virtually anywhere so that the typical restrictions of site and time found in scheduling a fixed computer lab are removed. This allows the GEaRS group to present seminars or teach a hands-on workshop wherever the instruction is desired and most easily accessible to a larger group. This year, the Lab-on-Wheels was upgraded with 9 new IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad T43p laptops, each with 2.13 GHz Intel Pentium processors, 2GB of RAM, and 60GB hard drives. All laptops have both Windows and Linux operating systems installed to accommodate a wide range of software packages. The Lab-on-Wheels facility was designed to couple with GEaRS' Seminars-on-Demand initiative.
Seminars-on-Demand
Seminars-on-Demand is a GEaRS group initiative designed to provide high performance computing and visualization-related education to the University community. The goal is simple: to deliver seminars tailored to precisely fit a researcher's needs and taught at a time and place to suit his/her convenience. Many seminars are taught using the GEaRS' Lab-on-Wheels facility. This year seminar topics included: HPC Group Cluster operation and use, Introduction to MPI, and Distributed MATLAB, in addition to Mathematica, Maple, ABAQUS, ANSYS, Patran/Nastran, and Gambit/Fluent.