This grant supports the acquisition of a high performance cluster and storage system to build the departmental computing infrastructure required for information technology research. This infrastructure will enable the PIs to conduct state-of-the-art research in six areas: (1) dynamic virtual environments for cyberspace, (2) design and implementation of scalable information systems, (3) push-based I/O servers, (4) management of wireless networks, (5) adaptive fault resilience for high end computing, and (6) scalable parallel numerical algorithms and simulations. Each of these projects requires significant computational resources, and some of them also require super-user privilege for individual system configuration and testing. A dedicated computing infrastructure is essential to the success of these projects. In addition, this infrastructure will offer a platform for students to learn and experiment with state-of-the-art computing technologies. In the context on on-going course enhancement activities, it will provide an environment for reforming the curriculum in the areas of parallel processing, distributed systems, computer networking, information retrieval, data mining, computer simulation, scientific computing, etc. Women are clearly underrepresented in computer science. Three of the five PIs are female faculty. They are actively recruiting female students and other underrepresented minorities. This CRI facility will enable scientific advances that would not otherwise be possible, and will substantially impact on the research and educational activities at the Illinois Institute of Technology. More information about this project can be found at the project Web site (http://meta.cs.iit.edu/~scf/).
This grant supports the acquisition of a high performance cluster and storage system to build the departmental computing infrastructure required for information technology research. This infrastructure enables the PIs to conduct state-of-the-art research in six areas: (1) dynamic virtual environments for cyberspace, (2) design and implementation of scalable information systems, (3) push-based I/O servers, (4) management of wireless networks, (5) adaptive fault resilience for high end computing, and (6) scalable parallel numerical algorithms and simulations. Each of these projects requires significant computational resources, and some of them also require super-user privilege for individual system configuration and testing. A dedicated computing infrastructure is essential to the success of these projects. A 64-node Sun Microsystems ComputeFarm is purchased for this purpose. It consists of a Sun Fire X4240 server, 64 Sun Fire X2200, with a totally of 130 processors and 520 cores. The nodes are connected fully with Gigabits Ethernet and partially with InfiniBand. The Sun Fire X4240 is configured with dual 2.7 GHz Opteron quad-core processors, 8GB memory, and 12 500GB 7200RPM SATA-II drives configured as RAID5 disk array. Each of the Sun Fire X2200 servers is equipped with dual 2.3GHz Opteron quad-core processors, 8GB memory, and a 250GB 7200RPM SATA hard drive. SSD was added on each node in April 2011. A 72-processor SiCortex cluster and a couple of workstations are also purchased with this grant. This combined parallel processing facility provides an adequate experimental platform for the six research projects. In addition, this facility provides an environment for reforming the curriculum and for students to learn and experiment with state-of-the-art computing technologies. It is also used for faculty and student recruiting. Tens of faculty members and hundreds of students benefit by the facility and more than one hundred scholarly publications have been published by the PIs and their students. This NSF CRI facility has enabled scientific advances that would not otherwise be possible, and made a substantial impact on the research and educational activities at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
