Next fall, Wesleyan students and faculty will perform research activities on the same state-of-the-art animation computers that produced Ice Age the Meltdown, a $652 million worldwide box office hit.

The computer hardware was donated July 2 by Greenwich, Conn.-based Blue Sky Studios, the creator of a number of award-winning digital animation features, including the Ice Age series and Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who, which took in nearly $300 million worldwide.

In 2008, Blue Sky Studios refreshed their technology for their latest movie, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, and bought racks of new computers.

“The old computer racks still had a lot of life left in them, so we went looking for large colleges and universities in Connecticut that might be able to make use of this kind of computing infrastructure, and to which we might donate these computers,” explains Andrew Siegel, head of systems at Blue Sky Studios. “Wesleyan seemed like a good candidate.”

Blue Sky arranged for the racks to be delivered to the Exley Science Center loading dock. They are now housed on the fifth floor of Information Technology Services.

“We requested two, but they graciously gave us four,” Ganesan “Ravi” Ravishanker, associate vice president for Information Technology Services.

Each rack holds 52 Angstrom Microsystem-brand “blades,” with a memory footprint of 12 or 24 gigabytes each. Combined, Blue Sky donated about 3.7 terabytes of total memory.

“This is just phenomenal,” says Henk Meij, senior consultant and manager of Unix Systems Group. “Once it’s in full operation, it’s going to be much appreciated by the researchers. They’re definitely going to notice a difference in how fast research can be done.” 

One rack will be devoted to supporting high performance computing at Wesleyan. The current system allows up to 300 “jobs” to run at once. An additional 100 jobs will be able to run with the new rack, and at higher processing speeds.

“If a graduate student in astronomy wants to calculate planet rotations in a section of the galaxy, he or she will be able to do this much faster,” Meij says.

Another rack will be used primarily by ITS in a pilot project of building a virtualized data center using an entire rack. Services such as blogs, wikis, web servers and similar applications could be hosted in such an environment. When a hardware failure occurs, or one server experiences heavy loads, the virtualization layer would migrate the services to healthy servers automatically in the virtualized environment.

The additional two racks will be used to replace any hardware that fails in production system. Wesleyan would need additional cooling systems to run all four racks at once.

The high-speed animation computers feature 104 Centralized Processing Units (CPU) per rack. Each rack has a current market value of approximately $35,000. The University of Connecticut’s drama and computer science engineering departments also are each receiving two racks.

Blue Sky, a wholly owned subsidiary of Fox Filmed Entertainment, relocated to Connecticut from New York in January, bringing with it more than 300 jobs. The company, which continues to expand, said it was attracted to Connecticut because of the state’s efforts to promote the film industry.

“This is a tremendous gift for our students and for our state,” Governor Jodi Rell said in a statement. “The film industry has clearly found a home in Connecticut and we are grateful for Blue Sky’s commitment to Connecticut and partnership in helping us develop the next generation of skilled, educated industry professionals. This generous donation comes at a time when resources for so many worthwhile programs are stretched thin.”

By Leyla Ezdinli -- An annual outreach program run by USC’s Collaboratory for Advanced Computing and Simulations is helping shape the future of computational science by encouraging members of underrepresented groups to pursue graduate work and research in scientific computing.

For the past eight years, the Computational Science Workshop for Underrepresented Groups has offered participants an opportunity to learn about complex research concepts in a hands-on and interdisciplinary environment.

The majority of participants are students and faculty members from small historically black colleges and universities with limited resources for research computing and curriculum development. For students, the workshop can have a profound influence on their choice of majors and careers. For faculty, the workshop offers the resources necessary to develop new courses and advance their research.

“The goal of the workshop is, in one week, to break the participants’ fear of computing and their ideas of parallel computing,” said Priya Vashishta, professor of materials science at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, professor of physics at USC College and director of the Collaboratory for Advanced Computing and Simulations.

“We do not ask that people know about computing before they arrive — all we ask is that they have a good head on their shoulders,” he said.

Teaching parallel computing in a way that is comprehensible to those without a solid foundation in computer science and advanced mathematics is no small feat.

Parallel computing is a sophisticated form of computation in which a complex problem is divided into smaller problems that are then distributed to a cluster of networked computers for simultaneous processing. Parallel computing allows researchers to solve problems involving extremely large data sets much faster than would serial computation, in which operations are performed in a linear manner.

The workshop takes a novel and ambitious approach to teaching parallel computing. On the first day, each student assembles his or her own computer from components and installs the Linux operating system. All the computers in the workshop are then networked together to form a cluster.

Over the course of the week, students learn to write and compile code, write parallel codes, run programs on the cluster and analyze the cluster’s performance metrics.

The workshop was designed and developed by Rajiv Kalia, Aiichiro Nakano and Vashishta, the founders of the collaboratory, all of whom hold joint appointments in USC’s departments of physics and astronomy, chemical engineering and materials science, and computer science.

“This is an extremely intense workshop,” Nakano said. “It was Priya’s vision to have students build a supercomputer cluster from personal computers. He trained all of us,” said Nakano, referring to the collaboratory faculty and graduate students who organize and teach the workshop each year.