The Chiba City Project

Chiba City is a scalability testbed for the High Performance Computing and Computer Science communities. It is designed to be a tool to help answer questions such as:

• What issues arise when today's existing libraries and code scale to hundreds or thousands of systems?
• What algorithms can scientific code use to scale to high performance computing systems of the near future, when systems will comprise thousands of nodes?
• What types of systems software and systems management tools can be built to make these large-scale systems operate efficiently?
• What new approaches can be considered to tackle problems of large scale?
• How can we effectively provide large-scale testbeds to the computer science community?
• Can a system be built of commodity components and open source tools that virtualizes the functions of a large computing resource?

The Mission

Research projects on Chiba are concentrating in four key areas:

• Scalable Libraries and Middleware
• Scientific Vizualization
• Distributed Computing
• Systems Software and Cluster Management

In addition, Chiba is a testbed for open source development of system software for high performance computing.

The Cluster

The Chiba City cluster is a 512 CPU cluster primarily running Linux. The cluster also includes a set of storage nodes, visualization nodes, and server nodes, as depicted in the configuration diagram.

The cluster was built in partnership with IBM and VA Linux Systems.

Availability and Usage

Chiba City is a system designed to support research and development. It is primarily focused on computer science scalability research. The system is continually under development, and is not meant to provide production computing cycles for number-crunching.

Chiba City is available on a limited basis for computational scientists who are collaborating with MCS scientists, and more generally available to computer scientists who are doing research in scalability. For information on requesting an account and using the system, please see the links along the left side of this page.