Research Computing Facility and Schorr Center
By Brian Neilson

While walking to lunch or to a football game, one may recently have noticed the shiny new building below South Stadium. After serving the athletic department since 1972, this building has been given new life as the Paul and June Schorr III Center for Computer Science and Engineering, home of the Research Computing Facility.

David Swanson, after completing his Ph.D. in chemistry at the UNL, worked on several post-doctorate research projects in computing. He returned to UNL in 1999 to continue his computer research. He was hired to establish the Research Computing Facility (RCF) that year, with funding from the National Science Foundation's Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research. The principle investigators included the original chair of the RCF Advisory Committee, Professor Sharad Seth of CSCE, and Kent Hendrickson of Information Services.

"Back then, I was a one-man operation," said Swanson, director of the RCF. "Now, we have five full-time staff, seven student workers, and three main machines."

Originally, the RCF provided an eight-CPU machine from SGI. Until this year, the Computer Science and Engineering Department (CSCE) and RCF were located in various places, including rented space in the old Miller & Paine Building at 13th and O Streets, with research housed in Ferguson Hall. Research assistants operated from the 501 Building. Additional machines were located in Scott Engineering Center.

Above: Red is the largest supercomputer on the UNL City Campus. Photo: Dan Mott

The idea came about to consolidate all of these computing facilities in one central location.

"About 13 years ago, renovations and upgrades were promised for Computer Science and Engineering facilities in Avery Hall," Swanson said. "Between the time of that promise and when it became reality, CSCE space needs doubled."

At about this time, the South Stadium building became available. Paul "Chip" Schorr IV and Melissa Condo, the children of Paul and June Schorr III, provided a significant contribution toward renovating and redesigning the former South Stadium Building.

"The family saw it as a unique project to honor their parents," said Robb Crouch, director of public relations for the University of Nebraska Foundation. "They are excited about unifying the computing areas."

Paul Schorr III, from Hastings, and June, from Chicago, moved to Lincoln in high school, where they met. They attended UNL and graduated in 1959, a year after they were married. Paul graduated with a degree in electrical engineering. He is currently president and CEO of ComCor Holding, Inc., in Lincoln. June graduated with degrees in fashion merchandising and English.

Construction on the Schorr Center began in January 2007 and was completed in late 2007. PrairieFire, Merritt and Red, the three supercomputers, were moved to the new building in March 2008. The basement of the Schorr Center has 2,500 square feet of space for the supercomputers.

"This is a vast improvement over the 300 square feet in the old Miller & Paine Building," Swanson said. Production-quality cooling and ventilation systems were also built into this room.

PrairieFire was originally constructed in 2002. It was the first clustered machine at the RCF. At that time, it was ranked as the 107th most powerful supercomputer in the world. It has since dropped out of the TOP500 list, but 400 new cores were added in 2008. A core is a basic processing unit. Most new PCs and laptops today have dual cores: two independent processors on the chip. PrairieFire now has 650 cores. It is used by campus researchers for such areas as quantum chemistry, quantum physics, finite element modeling and genome research.

Above: The Schorr Center is located under South Stadium behind Avery Hall. Photo: Brian Neilson

Merritt is an Altix shared memory machine with 512 GB of RAM. Most PCs have one or two GB of RAM. Chemists use the shared platform to compute electronic structure. Meteorologists use it for modeling climate, and mechanical engineers use it for modeling materials. Merritt is named after Merritt Reservoir near Valentine.

Red is the largest supercomputer at the RCF. It currently supports over 240 TB of data. It performs at over nine teraflops. Red recently added 100 TB of storage and 640 cores, bringing the total to 1,100 cores. It serves the new Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, which does atom smashing research. There are computers all around the world working together on this, and Red is one of them.

A large flat-panel monitor in the main office of the Schorr Center graphically features an aquarium full of "fish." This is not just art, however. Each fish on the screen represents a computing node in one of the supercomputers. Red fish are from the Red cluster. Green fish correspond to PrairieFire. The larger the fish, the larger the load that node is carrying.

"If ‘dead fish' are found floating at the top, they represents the nodes that are currently not responding," said Carl Lundstedt, grid system administrator.

The RCF is not a department entity. However, students in the CSCE department conduct research there, with the vast majority of users both undergraduate and graduate students, noted Swanson.

Above: Each fish represents a node in the PrairieFire and the Red supercomputers. This flat panel screen can be seen in the main office of the Schorr Center. Photo: Dan Mott

Above: Production-quality cooling and ventilation systems keep the PrairieFire and Merritt supercomputers running smoothly. Photo: Dan Mott

For more information about the Schorr Center and the supercomputers, visit the RCF Web site at http://rcf.unl.edu or contact the center at: rcf-support@unl.edu.