INTI: A Beowulf-class Parallel Supercomputer at IVIC

OVERVIEW

Venezuelan goverment "Support for Established-Groups" initiative, through funding from CONICIT, allowed as to make a great effort in building two Beowulf-class supercomputers for use in the research projects of four institutions: IVIC (Venezuelan Research Institute, where it is physically located), USB (Simon Bolivar Univ.), UCV (Venezuelan Central Univ.) and ULA (Los Andes Univ.). The supercomputer named "inti" (after the inca god 'sun') consist of 12 dual nodes. The supercomputer "LasVegas" (after the gambling american "MonteCarlo" city) consist of 6 dual nodes and will be located at ULA. Other small 4 dual nodes clusters will be located at USB and UCV, but all research groups will have access to big brother "inti".

DESCRIPTION

These are Beowulf-class parallel supercomputers built from a collection of dual processor 750Mhz Pentium III computers, each equipped with 512 MB of main memory, 9 GB HD per node and 18 GB HD at principal node. The machines are connected via fast switched Ethernet through a 100BT high performance switch running Xtreme Linux multiprocessing (SMP) kernel version 2.4.2-2smp using the RedHat distribution as the basic package. Programming languages comprises C, C++ and Fortran. A comercial compiler (PGF77 and PGHPF) was purchased to have a quick parallelized executable at least for two processor without much work. Other parallel programs are intended to be designed with MPI and PVM message-passing libraries.

OBJECTIVES

At IVIC

1. Parallel Quantum Chemistry with GAMESS.
2. Parallel Ab-Initio Molecular Dynamics.
3. Numerical optimization with parallel simulated annealing routines.
4. Numerical local-scaling for 3D systems in parallel.

At USB

1. Parallel Quantum Chemistry with GAMESS.
2. Parallel multiconfigurational wave function calculations for Van der Waals molecules.

At UCV

1. Parallel Quantum Chemistry with GAMESS.
2. Parallel Green-function methods.

At ULA

1. Parallel implementation of Monte Carlo calculations.