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The Albuquerque High Performance Computing Center (AHPCC) is a recently established Center at the University of New Mexico (UNM). It began as an outgrowth of the "Maui Project," the forerunner to the High Performance Computing Education & Research Center and the umbrella Center under which the AHPCC and the Maui High Performance Computing Center (MHPCC) conduct their missions. The AHPCC has evolved in six years from a small resource Center into a nationally recognized supercomputing center.
In 1994, the "Maui Project" established a Center on the UNM campus to provide resources, such as programming support and training to faculty and students. This Center was named the Albuquerque Resource Center and was established in the Galles Building, an old Cadillac dealership built in the mid-1950s. The initial staff was small—10 students and one research scientist with no computing systems other than workstations. Students conducted many of the workshops to train university faculty and students in the methods of parallel programming and utilization of massively parallel systems. The Center gradually added staff to address specific research and application needed to support the MHPCC and to work with UNM faculty and departments. But in late 1995, the original SP1 POWERparallel supercomputing system at the MHPCC was installed at the AHPCC to provide a local computing resource to UNM researchers.
The Albuquerque Resource Center, or the "ARC", as it was known, was formally chartered in 1996 as a center of the High Performance Computing Education & Research Center along with its sister Center, the Maui High Performance Computing Center. In mid-1997, Center administration and directors recognized the changing nature of the Center. To provide better support to on-campus activities the ARC underwent a major change in name and focus. The Center changed its name to the Albuquerque High Performance Computing Center, invested in computing support and equipment for visualization, and prepared for the addition of 128 SP2 nodes, again from MHPCC. In addition, the Center acquired an SGI Origin 8-node SMP computer for visualization research. Research Groups were formed in nine areas of interest to faculty, staff and Center, as the Center added more research assistants and post-doctoral personnel to the staff. The old ARC was beginning to look like a supercomputing center.
The steady growth continued into 1998, to the extent that the Center began an expansion into ab adjoining bay of the Galles building that added a new visualization laboratory, workshop, seminar and meeting rooms and office spaces. Work on the expansion began in late November 1998 and was completed in April 1999, but not before changes were made to the original expansion to accommodate a new type of supercomputing system that would be added to the Center’s resources. In January 1999, the National Computational Science Alliance provided funds, to be matched by AHPCC, for a 128-processor Intel Linux-based supercluster to serve Alliance and the National Science Foundation (NSF) researchers. The cluster, called Roadrunner, was unveiled in April 1999 in a ceremony that included Senator Pete Domenici. Roadrunner is the first production research supercomputer of its kind, and became a supernode of the Alliance’s National Technology Grid.
The AHPCC unveiled another technology advance in August, 1999 at the UNM Alliance Chautauqua (educational roadshow over the NCSA Access Grid). Over 125 participants locally and 100 people at distributed sites at universities across the country, watched the unveiling of the NCSA Access Grid. The Access Grid, developed at Argonne National Laboratory, an Alliance partner, streams audio, video, and data across the Internet in a "you are there" environment across a large screen format and spacious sound environment. Participants are able to share ideas in a unique collaborative setting. The Access Grid has since been expanded to well over 50 sites across the country.
Today, the AHPCC has several computing systems, including a new 512-processor Linux supercluster, ranking it among the top five academic institutions. Over forty graduate research assistants from 11 departments, 7 post-docs, 12 associated faculty from across the university, and 25 research and technical staff work in this interdisciplinary environment. The Center has become nationally recognized for the development and deployment of advanced high performance computing systems and research in applications as diverse as art and engineering. AHPCC now looks forward to the new millenium.
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