November 17, 2009–Cornell University’s Center for Advanced Computing (CAC), in partnership with Purdue University, has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) award to deploy The MathWorks MATLAB on the TeraGrid as an experimental computing resource.
MATLAB, the language of technical computing, is a programming environment for algorithm development, data analysis, visualization, and numeric computation. The TeraGrid is an NSF-sponsored open scientific discovery infrastructure that unites people, resources, and services to enable discovery in US science and engineering.
Specifically, the project is designed to provide a parallel MATLAB engine for Science Gateways, such as nanoHUB.org, a resource for research, education and collaboration in nanotechnology created by the NSF-funded Network for Computational Nanotechnology. Science Gateway users will access discipline-specific Web portals, and through simulation inputs via a Web form launch MATLAB simulations and get timely results without knowledge of the underlying software or hardware infrastructure. This will allow nanotech researchers to leverage the TeraGrid as research tool without first overcoming a platform-specific learning curve.
This initiative will provide seamless parallel MATLAB computational services running on Windows HPC Server 2008 to remote desktop and Science Gateway users with complex analytic and fast simulation requirements. MATLAB is an important data analysis tool for many TeraGrid users and, as a parallel resource, it has the potential to expand the high performance computing user community.
“MATLAB on the TeraGrid will be made available in its initial configuration as a 512-core experimental computing resource to researchers with TeraGrid certificates and through Science Gateways, such as nanoHUB.org,” says Gerhard Klimeck, director of the Network for Computational Nanotechnology at Purdue University, who is co-PI on the project along with Michael McLennan, a senior research scientist at Purdue.
“nanoHUB users will benefit from this new TeraGrid resource through a transparent and instantaneous access for several applications,” added McLennan. Researchers will connect from remote desktops running MATLAB Parallel Computing Toolbox to the TeraGrid resource running MATLAB Distributed Computing Server. Researchers with Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh, or Linux-based clients will be able to use the same utility cluster at Cornell.
“MATLAB on the TeraGrid will help enable a broader class of researchers who are well-versed in MATLAB to reduce the time to solution in a scalable manner without having to become parallel programming experts,” saiys Cornell University’s senior vice provost for research Robert Buhrman. “It will serve as a complementary experimental component to NSF’s large-scale eXtreme Digital vision and TeraGrid Science Gateways, and be a valuable tool to researchers focused on solving complex problems in the environment, health care, and many other science and engineering disciplines.”