data link Story: Recordbreaking Month of Computing

Recordbreaking Month of Computing

Never in the history of the Origin2000 Array has any group exceeded 100,000 CPU hours in one month.

Wai-Mo Suen (Washington University, St. Louis), Ed Seidel (Max Planck Institute, Germany), and at least eight colleagues have done it in style reaching nearly 140,000 in June 1999. The collaborators, who research neutron stars and black stars, accumulated over 17 processor-years in one month. A single user -- Lars Nerger of the team -- used 110,000 in a month, equivalent to almost 14 processor-years. Nerger was named one of the center's Top Users for June 1999.

Suen noted in an email to NCSA Senior Associate Director John Towns that the team did their "big runs" all under the same account to make sure that a run could be monitored on both sides of the ocean non-stop, to minimize the chances of something going wrong, and to make sure that whomever noticed a problem first could kill, correct, and restart job. The team is now working on analyzing the scientific content of their runs.

"These numbers are far beyond anything we have seen before," said Towns. "I'm looking forward to the visualizations!"

More information about the team's capability computing runs is in the NCSA online magazine Access.