Finally figured out what SWS/SEAS runs on:

http://www.indiana.edu/~uits/cpo/ibmsp/about.html

The IBM Teraflop SP System, also know as the UITS Research SP, is comprised of two physical IBM RS/6000 SP systems connected to form one logical system which will have a total theoretical peak compute capacity of 1.005 TeraFLOPS (1.005 trillion FLoating OPerations per Second), a total memory capacity of 452 gigabytes (452 billion bytes), and a total disk capacity of 5.3 terabytes (5.3 trillion bytes). The currently installed ten SP frames hold a total of 616 processors within 143 SP nodes. These nodes are interconnected via two low-latency high-speed (150 megabytes/second) networks using crossbar switch technology, referred to as the SP Switch. An SP Switch router, specially designed to support SP Switch adapter cards, links the two networks. The two SP systems which comprise the IBM Teraflop SP System are referred to as the Aries Complex and the Orion Complex.

The Aries Complex includes eight frames of 4-cpu Power3+ Thin nodes, providing a homogeneous parallel processing environment for 508 processors with a total of 453 gigabytes of distributed memory.

The Orion Complex houses two frames: one frame of 4-cpu Power3+ Thin nodes, and another frame of 16-cpu Power3+ High nodes. With 8 gigabytes of memory, these Power3+ High nodes provide an excellent symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) environment for large-memory parallel jobs. Indiana University will add yet this fall another powerful SMP system, a 16-cpu Power4 Regatta node, to the Orion Complex. The Regatta incorporates IBM’s newest processor and node technology, designed to provide excellent performance for both scientific and commercial/database workloads. (Further information about Power4 and Regatta technology is available at http://www.ibm.com/servers/eserver/pseries/news/pressreleases/2001/oct). The Orion Complex is currently located with the Aries Complex in Bloomington, but will be relocated to Indianapolis in the near future to better support researchers at the School of Medicine.

Within the IBM TeraFLOP SP, each node runs its own copy of the IBM’s Unix operating system, AIX, but system managment of this large cluster is integrated and facilitated via IBM’s SP management software, PSSP (Parallel System Support Program). The entire system is accessed via a single batch scheduler, IBM’s LoadLeveler package, such that a user may log in to any of the SP nodes and submit a batch job, and this job is then dispatched to a suitable node with the required hardware, software and available cycles to run the job. While a large majority of the cycles consumed on the IBM Teraflop SP are used by parallel programs (i.e., programs which run simultaneously on several processors), there is also a significant amount of serial (i.e., single-cpu) work performed on this system. A wealth of software is available, including several commercial statistical and mathematical packages, scientific/numerical libraries, and database applications.

Of benefit to all users but especially to parallel programmers is a high-performance parallel filesystem, IBM’s GPFS (General Parallel File System), which supports the reading and writing of data simultaneously to and from several nodes across several disks, but which also supports the usual Unix file system commands. The Aries Complex access a 570 gigabyte GPFS filesystem, while a 144 gigabyte GPFS filesystem is accessible to the nodes of the Orion Complex. In addition, the Teraflop SP is connected via the SP Switch router to the mass store system, another IBM RS/6000 SP system which runs the High Performance Storage System (HPSS) for fast archival and retrieval of large amounts of data to and from disk cache and tape.

“SP” stands for Scalable PowerParallel:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Scalable_POWERparallel

https://computing.llnl.gov/tutorials/ibm_sp/

This tutorial provides an overview of IBM POWER hardware and software components with a practical emphasis on how to develop and run parallel programs on IBM POWER systems. It does not attempt to cover the entire range of IBM POWER products, however. Instead, it focuses on the types of IBM POWER machines and their environment as implemented by Livermore Computing (LC).

From the point of historical interest, the tutorial begins by providing a succinct history of IBM’s POWER architectures. Each of the major hardware components of a parallel POWER system are then discussed in detail, including processor architectures, frames, nodes and the internal high-speed switch network. A description of each of LC’s IBM POWER systems follows.

The remainder, and majority, of the tutorial then progresses through “how to use” an IBM POWER system for parallel programming, with an emphasis on IBM’s Parallel Operating Environment (POE) software. POE provides the facilities for developing and running parallel Fortran, C/C++ programs on parallel POWER systems. POE components are explained and their usage is demonstrated. The tutorial concludes with a brief discussion of LC specifics and mention of several miscellaneous POE components/tools. A lab exercise follows the presentation.

Level/Prerequisites: Intended for those who are new to developing parallel programs in the IBM POWER environment. A basic understanding of parallel programming in C or Fortran is assumed. The material covered by EC3501 - Introduction to Livermore Computing Resources would also be useful.

Link @ the end:
https://computing.llnl.gov/tutorials/lc_resources/

Thought this was interesting and semi-relevant:

Researchers Plan to Simulate Movements of 300 Million Americans
by Lisa Zyga, Technology / Computer Sciences

(PhysOrg.com)—Researchers from Virginia Tech are developing a computer simulation that matches the movements of all 300 million people in towns across the US. The team hopes that the model will help them understand the spread of contagious diseases, fads, and traffic flows.

Currently, the researchers’ model consists of about 100 million Americans, and they expect to be able to simulate the movement of all 300 million US residents in the next six months. To achieve this, the researchers use large amounts of publicly available demographic data, mostly from the US Census. Each synthetic American possesses as many as 163 variables, which describe characteristics such as age, education level, occupation, and whether one lives with a family or alone.

The software, called EpiSimdemics, can provide an accurate simulation of the demographic attributes of groups composed of 1500 people or more. Based on the data, the software generates individuals to populate real US cities, giving them real street addresses and real jobs or schools within a reasonable distance from their address. Individuals are also matched to local grocery stores and shopping centers, which are identified through a database from Navteq, a digital mapping company.

One of the first applications for compiling all this data will be studying how contagious diseases, such as a flu epidemic, might spread through different regions. The software infects a few simulated individuals with the flu, and tracks them as they go about their daily lives. The model gives each person a different probability of responding to the virus, derived from the individual’s data, such as age and general health.

Using data from all the interactions between infected individuals and others, the algorithm determines the number of new infections. The software treats each person and location as a separate set of calculations, so that many parts can be computed in parallel on a supercomputer. By breaking up the problem in this way, the researchers could significantly speed up the calculations.

By showing the path that a virus takes through a population, the simulation can help researchers implement effective public health intervention programs. The simulation can also determine when the infection peaks, representing the biggest burden on a city’s health system, and preparing officials.

“The vision is for a Google-like interface, where you approach the system and ask it a question,” says Christopher Barrett, who works on the project and is the director of Virginia Tech’s Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory. “The framework is there, and now we’re pushing the system to larger and larger scales.”

http://www.physorg.com/news148018856.html

!!!! Hell yes it was, thank you sir.

The article I see emerging is going to be positive—about using this tech to build a real-deal version of Bucky’s World Game.  My biggest disappointment with Superstruct was that it wasn’t grounded in data or simulation....just narratives and “Cool” ideas, which definitely has it’s place.  I’d just like to play with something more substantial, as well as see someone build a platform for testing solutions and getting data we can bring to heads of state and CEOs...."chew on this.”

If you want to model how infectious diseases spread, you need a decent simulator to see how the various coping strategies pan out. Your simulation needs to take into account the population, its age and gender distribution, where people live and how far they travel from home to work and which people share homes.

But making this data realistic would be hard. After all, would anybody willingly agree to have their real data entered into such a simulation?

Actually yes. Swedes. All nine million of them.

Yep, the personal details of the entire Swedish population have been used to create what must be the world’s largest and most realistic computer simulation of the way infectious diseases spread.

Lisa Brouwers at the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control and buddies have built a simulation called Microsim in which every member of the Swedish population is represented with details including their sex, age, family status, school, workplace and their geographic location at these places to within 100 metres.

That makes for potentially fantastic simulations but it also raises extraordinary questions over privacy. The data is only minimally anonymized: each individual is given a random identifier but otherwise their personal data is intact.

Given that the team is combining data from three different sources, this doesn’t sound like nearly enough protection.

But Brouwers must know what she’s doing. Or at least be praying that the rest of Sweden doesn’t find out what she’s done.

Simulating Sweden and the pdf of the paper.

Thanks all - very useful info.

I’ve been reading up on this kind of thing lately, two docs I highly recommend are:

Database State, “a comprehensive map of UK government databases”
http://www.jrrt.org.uk/uploads/database-state.pdf

The Shape of Things to Come, a report on surveillance and database development in the EU.
http://www.statewatch.org/analyses/the-shape-of-things-to-come.pdf

They are getting more complex. Someone is trying really hard to get hits from a basically dead board. But it gets indexed by google so I guess that’s all that matters.