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CECS Spotlight: Multicore computer to help train more sleek geeks
A new high-powered computer launched at ANU will help address Australia's dearth of technicians skilled in parallel and concurrent processing - the technology that underpins modern websites and databases.
Sun Microsystems has donated a $30,000 T2 multicore processor to the ANU College of Engineering and Computer Science to support a new postgraduate course on multicore computing, which will be offered to Masters students and people from industry for the first time next year. Its use is also being integrated in relevant undergraduate courses.Computer scientist Dr Peter Strazdins said that unlike a conventional server computer, which has its processors connected by expensive interconnects, the T2 has 64 processors on a single chip. He said this means it is able to switch between a large number of tasks very quickly.
"Imagine you have a web server that's receiving 500 requests from different users at the same time. For some of the larger sites that's a very conservative number. Still, you want to be able to respond to these requests quickly. More conventional processing technology would be delayed by the time needed to access various discs, whereas a powerful parallel processor like the T2 would be able to 'mask' that lag time."
Dr Strazdins said that while this parallel or concurrent technology is essential for running many online databases and other information sets, there are very few people in Australia with the training to understand how this kind of technology works.
"As a nation we're not training enough people to work with this kind of parallel and concurrent processing technology, yet it underpins such a large portion of our information economy," he said. Dr Strazdins, who has been working in the area of parallel processing since the 1990s, says the technology is likely to become more and more important as computational demands outstrip the ability of individual processors to keep up.
Dr Strazdins said another reason multicore processors like the T2 are advantageous is because of their power efficiency, which is considerably higher than other kinds of server computers, and thus more cost effective and environmentally friendly.
The computer scientist is also part of a team of researchers who've been working with Sun Microsystems on Linkage Grant projects from the Australian Research Council since 2002. Led by Associate Professor Alistair Rendell, the team have been conducting research into improving the efficiency of high performance computing used in computational science.
