borg Update

• About Borg
• Software on borg: Now and Coming Soon

Last spring we announced the acquisition of a Convex Exemplar SPP1200, a small supercomputer with big expansion possibilities. Our Exemplar is currently equipped with 16 CPUs (HP PARISC 7200), 1 GB of real memory and 80 GB of disk storage. This machine enables you to take advantage of "parallel processing" in which multiple processors can cooperate on solving a single program simultaneously. The Exemplar runs version 4.1 of the HP Convex SPP-UX operating system which is a variant of HP-UX UNIX that has been customized to manage a massively parallel environment.

The machine has been named borg (borg.uic.edu) in tribute to episodes on the TV series Star Trek, The Next Generation that involved a massive alien spacecraft in which all decisions were made in parallel based on the collective knowledge of thousands of half-machine/half-organic cyborgs.

For details on this system and its capabilities, please visit the Borg home page. To review last spring's announcement, which explains concepts of parallel processing, see the March/April edition of the ADN Connection.

The Convex is targeted to meet the needs of three groups on campus. The first consists of researchers whose programs have exceeded the computing and/or memory capabilities of their desktop workstations. The second group are those who use the UICVM mainframe for computationally intensive work and the third group consists of faculty and students who wish to learn about the techniques used to create programs that can take advantage of parallel processing computation.

A personal account on borg is available to any faculty member who requests one and to any student who has obtained a faculty member's permission. Note that the Convex is not intended to be used for general needs such as email, news reading, or Web browsing; its resources should be used only for computationally intensive needs. If you wish to obtain an account please send email to systems@uic.edu with the subject: borg account request. Please include your netid, your telephone number, and a brief description of your intended usage. Students must also provide the name and email address of the faculty member who is sponsoring the account.

We will offer the seminar Introduction to the Convex Exemplar in October. Details will be available the borg home page.

We've spent much of the summer developing the Exemplar, and work is still in progress. Some of the software and packages that are available now or will be soon are listed in the box to the left; visit the borg home page for more details. Many of these packages, in particular the graphics packages and the profiler, debugger, and online documentation system, have X Windows graphical interfaces.

cc compiler

Convex's C compiler with parallel programming functionality; available now

cxpa profiler

Convex's graphical program execution profiler; available now

cxdb debugger

An X window GUI debugger used to debug fc and cc programs; available now

fc compiler

Convex's FORTRAN compiler with parallel programming functionality; available now

ANSYS 5.2

discrete element analysis, models of structures, components or systems; physical responses, stress levels, temperature distributions and so on; coming in September

CADPAC 6.0

quantum chemistry package for the calculation of electric and magnetic properties, and force fields; on order

EQS 5.1

statistical package for equation models; multiple regression, multivariate regression, factor analysis, mean analysis, population analysis, frontiers models, and panel data models; available now

Gaussian 94

chemical electronic structure modeling; models broad range of molecular systems under variety of conditions, performing computations using the basic laws of quantum mechanics; coming in September

IMSL 3.0

general purpose algebraic subroutine library, matrix manipulation and so on; coming in September

Limdep 7.0

specialized statistical program for the estimation of qualitative response models, limited dependent variables, and duration models; available now

PinPoint

Convex's online documentation system for graphical display and search of Convex documents; available now

SAS 6.11

general purpose statistical analysis system; available now

SPLUS 3.3

statistical graphical environment for visually exploring and thoroughly analyzing data; wide array of graphics, data manipulation tools, statistical summary functions, and classical and modern modeling techniques; available now

SPSS 6.1

general purpose statistical analysis system; coming in September

Comments are appreciated; send them to
Jim O'Leary, joleary@uic.edu