Rutgers’ homegrown supercomputer Rutgers PC network ranked in the world’s top 20 percent Archived article from Oct 6, 2003 By Joseph Blumberg   Christian Uebing, manager of high performance computing in Rutgers' department of physics and astronomy, with his high-performance computing brainchild. Photo by Nick Romanenko When Christian Uebing began connecting an array of PCs together for the physics department, he didn’t expect his homegrown creation to be ranked in the top 20 percent of the world’s 500 best-performing supercomputers. “My dream was to be part of the top 200,” said Uebing, manager of high performance computing in Rutgers’ department of physics and astronomy and one of the few experts in computational physics with sufficient experience to create such a machine. “When I heard the news, I was astounded. This significantly exceeded my aspirations.” The distinction, conferred by the TOP500 project — a consortium of computing experts at institutions in the United States and Germany — makes Uebing’s brainchild the world’s 84th most powerful supercomputer on the list. With a peak performance rating of 1.69 teraflops (trillions of floating point operations per second), the system has become not only the fastest computer on campus, but #1 in the state of New Jersey. Parallel or distributed computing, as this networked approach is known, is not new but the level of Uebing’s accomplishment is. Uebing had brought his own designs to Computer Management Corporation (CMC) in Middlesex, N.J., which constructed 280 workstations to his specifications. “For most of the components, he even picked out the parts,” says CMC Vice President Bill Kelly. The ranking is all the more surprising because when Uebing arrived at Rutgers a few years ago, he was asked to set up his network on a very small budget. “Usually, you need tens of millions of dollars to set up a supercomputer,” Uebing said. “But what we did gave us great computational power for a modest price.” Three physics faculty members from Rutgers’ Center for Materials Theory, Gabi Kotliar, Karin Rabe and David Vanderbilt, supplied the motivation for the project, which was developed and managed by Uebing. To construct a computer capable of immense atomic and electronic structure calculations, Uebing and the three physicists obtained a $224,000 grant from the National Science Foundation plus $96,000 in matching funds from the university. Rutgers also saw to the room renovations needed to accommodate the multiple banks of PCs. Uebing’s resulting creation has turned out to be a highly flexible, incredibly powerful, general purpose machine. The computer gets nearly 100 percent usage for the work of the three materials theorists and Uebing’s research on nanostructured systems alone, but others in the department are benefiting as well. Astronomer Jerry Sellwood has used the supercomputer in his studies of dark matter in the universe and Ted Madey of the Laboratory for Surface Modification has plans to put it through its paces as well.

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