IU Bloomington has launched a new high-speed Internet service for research and education, which is now available to IU Southeast.
The new Monon100 network link is an Internet speed upgrade from 10 to 100 gigabytes per second, making it one of the fastest in the nation.
The purpose of the upgrade is to expedite access to IU Bloomington’s super computer, or “Big Red,” in order to compute enormous volumes of data involved in certain types of research.
Currently, there is need for high-speed transfer among researchers at IU Southeast. This resource would aid professors using large computer programs to model and analyze specific systems.
“It’s really about the system that you’re studying,” Victor Waingeh, assistant professor of chemistry, said.
Waingeh said he thinks the network will be beneficial for individuals who operate computational work outside of IU Bloomington.
Waingeh said he plans to use the network for his research in computational bio-physics.
“Programs that I use on my computer normally runs in a series,” Waingeh said. “It runs commands one step at a time, but not with a multi-processor like ‘Big Red.’ When I send a command to that server, it is broken into sub-commands and computed simultaneously.”
Waingeh said, if he wanted to run 100 simulations on his computer, it would require 100 steps, and he would have to wait for each step to be processed one at a time.
“With ‘Big Red,’ I can export the job to the server, and it will split the job among nodes,” Waingeh said. “It will choose 10 nodes and give each one 10 steps. After they are computed, the results will be joined together, configured and exported back to me, so a project that used to take 100 minutes, suddenly takes 1 minute.”
“Big Red” has been available for this type of computation for some time, but the transfer rate for IU Southeast researchers used to span about 10 days. With the Monon100 network upgrade, it now takes about 24 hours.
“The problem comes when you are trying to access ‘Big Red’ from a remote location like IU Southeast,” Waingeh said. “The Internet connection needs to be at a certain level if you are going to get the job done in a reasonable amount of time.”
Access to ‘Big Red’ via Monon100 will require a specialized Internet account, which researchers can apply for and be granted with a certain amount of space. Students will be granted access through sub-accounts created by and with the permission of their research professor.
“My research students would be running their jobs as well through their sub-accounts,” Waingeh said. “These sub-accounts help the students have some level of independence. If I am not here, they can still do their work.”
By S.B. WEBER
Staff
samweber@ius.edu
