The latest addition to the Alliance's computer arsenal is a workstation-based Linux Supercluster, called Roadrunner, located at the Albuquerque High Performance Computing Center (AHPCC) on the campus of the University of New Mexico (UNM). Roadrunner is an Alta Technology Corporation 64-node AltaCluster containing 128 Intel 450 MHz Pentium II processors. The supercluster runs the Linux operating system and the processors are interconnected via a Myrinet network for high-speed communications.

Frank Gilfeather, Executive Director of UNM's High Performance Computing, Education and Research Center, sees that the focus of the Linux Supercluster activity is to provide a shared parallel-computing environment for researchers across the nation. Roadrunner provides the computing power of a comparable conventional supercomputer at about one-tenth the cost.

Roadrunner will address the major utilization issues associated with clusters. Until recently, cluster technology has not been able to easily deliver production-level scalable computing resources. Assembling and administering a cluster meant the researcher had to essentially be a computer scientist with a basic understanding of networking and operating systems. Roadrunner will provide improved management tools, job scheduling, and a development environment for extending the tools currently available for heterogeneous computing.

Adding the Roadrunner Supercluster to the Grid ensures that scientists will have access to a testbed for computer scientists developing portable programming languages and to an environment to compare the performance of applicationsaccross different architectures. This includes both, traditional high performance computing applications and applications in the emerging national information infrastructure, including applications such as scalable web serving, interactive visualization/data exploration, information serving, and data mining.

The Roadrunner Supercluster is a strategic collaboration with Intel Corp. and Alta Technologies