In 2006, Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer told state officials and
private companies that he no longer wanted the Rocky Mountain region in
the Upper Midwest to be the great American supercomputing desert.
Schweitzer saw high tech as a way of revitalizing the
region’s economy, attracting businesses and creating jobs, and doing so
while minimizing the harm to the area’s environment.
Three years later, the Rocky Mountain Supercomputing Centers was
opened in Butte, Mont. The nonprofit entity was created through the
work of both the state government and private corporations like IBM,
with the aim of giving anyone of any size—from private businesses to
public researchers to government agencies—that needs it access to
supercomputing capabilities that they otherwise may not have gotten.
And as they enter 2010, officials with the RMSC are
expecting the number of organizations looking to take advantage of this
to grow.
“This is the complete democratization of this kind of
capability,” Earl Dodd, strategist with IBM’s Deep Computing business
and executive director of the RMSC, said in an interview. “It is
available to any kind of business. We don’t expect to replace what
everyone else has, just supplement it.”
Peter Ffoulkes, vice president of marketing for
Adaptive Computing, a partner in the creation of the “Big Sky”
supercomputer, agreed.
“What this is really about is using HPC
[high-performance computing] for businesses to make [the region]
competitive,” Ffoulkes said in an interview. “It’s using supercomputing
for economic development.”
The Rocky Mountain region until now had been behind
the rest of the country is jumping on the high-tech bandwagon. A study
conducted by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and the ITIF
(Information Technology and Innovation Foundation) in 2007 found that
of the five states in the region, only Colorado was among the top 10 in
adapting to the new IT-driven economy.
Colorado was ninth, followed by Utah in 12th. After that, Idaho was 24th, and Montana and Wyoming were 42nd and 43rd, respectively.
During a presentation in June 2009, when the RMSC
opened, Alex Philp, president and chairman of the center, showed a map
of the United States. The region was circled, and labeled as “The Great
American Supercomputing Desert.”
The Big Sky supercomputer will change all that, Philp
said in an interview. The affordable, distributed nature of the system
will bring supercomputing to businesses, research facilities and
educational institutions throughout the region, and even beyond, he
said. It will attract businesses and bring jobs to the Rocky Mountain
states.
“You don’t have to be part of a larger
corporation [to take advantage of supercomputing capabilities],” Philp
said. “We don’t have to limit our lives by black lines, by borders on a
map.”
The state of Montana teamed up with IBM to create Big
Sky, an IBM 1350 array that comprises a host of System x and System p
servers. IBM has invested more than $3 million into the initiative, and
is partnering with a number of other tech vendors, including Adaptive
Computing, Microsoft, NextIO—which sells virtual networking
technology—and Nice Systems, which offers solutions and services that
help analyze data from telephony, e-mail, the Internet, radio and video.
The system, which primarily is subsidized by Montana
taxpayers, runs on Microsoft’s Windows HPC Server 2008, giving
customers the familiar Windows experience in their supercomputing
environment.
It also offers a cooling exchange system that
incorporates IBM’s Cool Blue technology and uses the heat generated by
the cluster to help heat the offices on the building’s third, fourth
and fifth floors, saving about $40,000 in the cost of heating the
building.
It currently offers 3.8 teraflops (trillions of
floating point operations per second), and will grow to 25 to 50
teraflops, according to IBM. If demand exceeds Big Sky’s
capacity, the RMSC can shift workloads to IBM’s Computing on Demand
cloud computing center.
The computing resources within Big Sky can be
dynamically allocated based on workload demands, so customers only pay
for the resources they use, according to Philp. The goal was to create
a powerful computing environment that is easy to manage, flexible and
dynamic, and is accessible to anyone who needs it, said IBM’s Dodd.
“It is the complete democratization of this kind of capability,” Dodd said. “It is available to any kind of business.”
Over the past few months, Big Sky has attracted a
wide range of customers, according to IBM officials. For example,
researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture are using the system
to help manage the global food supply, while professors and researchers
from the University of Montana and Montana State University are
conducting research into such areas as astrophysics, climate and
erosion modeling, metallurgy and intelligent transportation.
In addition, one company is mapping the placement of
wind farms, another is using the computer to help mitigate risks
associated with bioreactor yields, and another—Scalable Analytics—is
analyzing real-time stock feeds.
An Indian reservation is using Big Sky to study carbon management on tribal lands.
Such examples are giving life to Gov. Schweitzer’s
vision of making the Butte supercomputing center the engine that is
going to revitalize the Rocky Mountain region.
“He’s not the kind of guy who wants to be second-best in anything,” Philp said.
IT & Network Infrastructure News & Reviews 
