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Sun Solutions Boost Supercomputing Power at American Museum of Natural History Technology Donation Valued at More than USD$1 Million Sun has donated two parallel clusters to the American Museum of Natural History, one that includes 24 Sun FireTM V60X servers, and the other three Sun FireTM V1280 servers and one Sun FireTM V880z visualization server running the SolarisTM Operating System (Solaris OS). The Museum's Department of Astrophysics will use the arrays for research into the formation and evolution of stars, star clusters and galaxies. Sun's 40-processor cluster with 304 Gb of RAM provides the research team with the ability to process large parallel jobs with low latency. The addition of the Sun Fire V60X servers also enabled the Museum to put the next-generation digital technology to new use with SonicVision, the innovative digitally animated alternative-rock music show that opened to great acclaim last fall in the Hayden Planetarium in the Museum's Rose Center for Earth and Space. Sun's sponsorship and technology donation is valued at more than USD$1 million. "The computational power delivered to us by Sun Microsystems' technology has expanded our research capabilities," said Michael J. Novacek, senior vice president, Provost, and Curator American Museum of Natural History. "With the addition of these parallel clusters, museum scientists are already beginning to make exciting discoveries in astrophysics and beyond, and we are very grateful for Sun's generosity." According to a Sun press release, "the Museum's Department of Astrophysics is utilizing the high-performance cluster to run simulations of star formation at many scales. Grid-based simulations at resolutions up to 2563 zones of non-ideal magnetohydrodynamics model the formation of single star-forming cores at scales of 1,000 AU (1 AU is the Earth-Sun distance). At the 1-10 light year scale, chemistry is included to model star-forming clouds of interstellar molecular gas. At the 1,000 light year scale, adaptive mesh refinement techniques allow modeling of the hypersonic turbulent flows resulting from hundreds of supernova explosions. Finally, smoothed particle hydrodynamics allows modeling of star formation in complete spiral galaxies, using more than a million particles." The Museum co-produced its planetarium show, SonicVision, with MTV2 and musical artist Moby, with music featuring tracks from Radiohead, U2, David Bowie and many other artists. The dual-processor Sun Fire V60X servers constitute a "render farm" that enabled staff to create the show's complicated visual effects in only a few months.
Other projects that employ the new computing resources include study of
the effects on intergalactic gases of star formation, radiation and
supernova explosions. The advanced computing technology has also
enabled researchers to detect metal-poor stars and numerous erupting
novae in the Virgo galaxy.
[...read more...]
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Sun Solutions Boost Supercomputing Power at American Museum of Natural History
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