We have our own supercomputer!

UH Hilo’s Computer Science Department has received the recently decommissioned IBM Netfinity Cluster supercomputer system from the Maui High Performance Computing Center and is using the system to support high performance computing instruction and research. Known throughout the Department of Defense research community as “Huinalu,” the IBM cluster was one of the 100 most powerful supercomputers in the world when first deployed at MHPCC just over five years ago. This machine will enable the CS department to expand more aggressively into high performance computing.

Huinalu is based on .933 GHz Intel Pentium III processors arranged in 128 two-processor nodes, each with 1GB of RAM and connected as a single system using the Myrinet interconnect. The system is the first of its kind at UH Hilo and will provide approximately 254 GigaFLOPS (250 billion floating point operations per second) of raw computing power.

Dr. Sevki Erdogan, Associate Professor of Computer Science, notes that "Few schools the size of UH Hilo have such facilities available." UHH acquired this system through Dr. Erdogan's work on the UH system-wide high performance computing committee. It also didn't hurt that we have several graduates of our program working at MHPCC. Mr. Donald Tripp, a UHH computer science student who worked at MHPCC this past summer, was responsible for many of the details of packing and shipping this machine, and will be helping to manage it here on campus.

This machine will be used in computer science instruction on parallel architectures and algorithms, but the department is also looking for faculty doing research that can benefit from supercomputer power.