Inside this Issue

• Near-Future Ocean Modeling
• Art in Science
• Designing New Materials
• Summer Interns
• ARSC Cadet Program
• Expanding our Horizons
• Cray SX-6
• Modeling the Arctic Ice
• ARSC Training Workshops

Expinding our Horizons continued

Storage Upgrades

Nanook/Seawolf
Sun Fire™ 6800

The center installed two Sun Fire™ 6800 systems, named Nanook and Seawolf, each with eight, 900 Mhz UltraSparc 3™ processors and 10.5 terabytes (TB) of raw disk. Using Sun StorEdge™ Utilization Suite and StorEdge™ Performance Suite, the Sun systems provide ready access to data on ARSC supercomputers, visualization resources and workstations and will ease the burden of working with the large data volumes that many computational models produce. These systems are connected to the center’s existing StorageTek™ data silos. Upgrades to the silos have more than tripled the center’s potential storage capacity from 300 terabytes to one petabyte (1,024 TB).

Visualization Upgrades

Discovery Lab

In spring of 2003, ARSC unveiled the center’s first fully-immersive virtual environment, a four-projector Mechdyne Flying Flex™ system. The three walls and single floor three-dimensional displays that make up the system allow scientists to virtually explore data without the constraints of traditional two-dimensional displays.

This system is configured in the ARSC Discovery Lab, which is located in the Rasmuson Library on the main UAF campus. Igie, the Image Generator for the Discovery Lab is an SGI Onyx 3200™ system located 7,000 fiber-optic cable-feet up the hill in the Butrovich building. Having one of the longest monitor cables ever used, the Mechdyne Flying Flex™ experiences insignificant latency in refresh rate, which is virtually unnoticed by the user. Four processors are currently available for user applications, with each pair of processors having 2 GB of memory. Igie contains two SGI Infinite Reality4™ graphics pipes. Within each graphics pipe are two raster managers, each with 1 GB of memory dedicated to real-time texture manipulation, giving Igie a total of 4 GB of dedicated graphics memory. The combined resolution of the left, center and right walls is 3840 x 1024 pixels, giving a contiguous display area of 3,932,160 pixels.

Special eyeglasses use a shutter mechanism synchronized with the computer to shift vision from eye to eye so swiftly that the wearer does not notice. Because each eye sees an image from a slightly different angle, the visualization appears three-dimensional.
The Discovery Lab is available to researchers, scientists and UAF students to explore their data in a virtual environment. It affords users the opportunity to conduct research in areas like computer-user interfaces and to better understand results of studies, such as tsunami inundation, the aurora borealis, ocean circulation and molecular chemistry. Not limited to science, the facility offers other forms of creative expression such as 3D animation and virtual tours.

Continuous upgrades in power, memory, visualization, networking and storage have dynamically expanded and diversified ARSC’s resources over the years. Attracting an ever-increasing pool of talented individuals to join the staff, the center provides a highly effective and innovative environment for computational users to pursue their varied research interests.

With the arrival of these new systems, expansion has also included the addition of a large new area of office space to further accommodate ARSC’s most important resource—the people who make everything work with such great success. The consultants, specialists, analysts, researchers, administrative personnel, faculty, advisors, students and interns offer an extraordinarily cohesive team to support the computing resources that ARSC has to offer its users. It looks like the next decade will prove even more interesting than the last.