Eva Hocks

In 1999 I came to San Diego from Germany to work at the San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC). SDSC, an organized research unit of UC San Diego, develops and applies advanced computing technologies to demanding computational science problems. In doing so, SDSC is leading the effort by the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) to deploy a national metacomputing infrastructure and foster scientific research.

I am the lead system administrator for the ASCI Blue Horizon IBM SP system. The name Blue Horizon heralds the dawn of a new age in scientific discovery and reflects SDSC’s collaboration with IBM. Blue Horizon is the most powerful computer available to the U.S. academic community and currently the 8th most powerful computer in the world. Recent upgrades boosted the machine’s peak performance to 1.7 teraflops — 1.7 trillion operations per second and added a higher-speed switch that connects the system’s 152 nodes.

The SDSC archival file-storage systems support storage requirements ranging from a few hundred GB to several terabytes (TB). The SDSC High Performance Storage System provides 1 TB of disk cache and up to 180 TB of storage in three StorageTek silos controlled by a 23-node IBM SP system. The archive currently holds more than 80 TB of data in 7 million files.

One of the three supercomputers that SDSC supports for the national research community is an IBM RS/6000 SP with an AIX operating system. The IBM RS/6000 SP has 1052 375-MHz processors, each with 4 gigabytes (GB) of memory.

The RS/6000 SP AIX operating system has a helpful system management interface tool (SMIT), as well as very useful debugging support with sysdumps, crash, snap, and for the SP, the css.s