University of California-Berkeley
SimMillennium is a large cluster-of-clusters supporting research in novel techniques for Computational Science and Engineering and for the design of complex systems. It convenes an interdisciplinary community to work, think, and study in a computationally rich environment with deep information stores and powerful services, where ideas are tested through simulation and data is shared and visualized through natural actions. The project leverages major donations from Intel, IBM, Microsoft, Sun, and Bay Networks to construct a testbed extending researcher desktops to SMP servers, group clusters, a large campus cluster, and novel data-interaction devices through gigabit networking. This distributed pool of well-connected resources will be managed as a computational economy, which adapts automatically to changing user demand, system configuration, and component failures. It should enable advances in the computational algorithms and programming environments for solvers used in the simulation and modeling of earthquakes, star formation, and technology CAD on systems with deep memory hierarchies. It will address system design challenges of emerging high-speed networking technologies while developing foundations for the design of large, complex systems. It will motivate new ways of assimilating and interacting with large volumes of information and with each other.
