You may like to know that around 57,000 CPU hours were consumed by our users' programs in August this year. This is a new record for High Performance Computing (HPC) usage at the Computer Centre Supercomputing and Visualisation Unit. Simply put, it is like running an application for more than six and a half years on a single CPU to consume that amount of CPU hours. But HPC is not just about how much CPU hours we can get out of the systems. It is also about exploring emerging technologies, such as Grid Computing, achieving speed-up through parallel processing, and using the most appropriate software or system for an application to optimise usage. We have a bit of each of these to share with you in this issue of our HPC newsletter.

Happy reading!

NUSGRID, a computational grid prototype being developed by SVU, will connect compute resources across three organizations at NUS. This grid seeks to enable resource sharing and improve resource utilization across the organizations. A web portal provides easy access to NUSgrid and lets users easily compile and run serial and parallel jobs. Although the prototype currently has limited resources and applications available, there are ongoing plans to improve and expand it with additional resources. NUSgrid will be launched before the year end. In this article, we introduce some of its features. Please read on ...

If you are using the Fluent software to solve your CFD problems, do you know that you can easily speed up the simulation and cut down the time to solution by running Fluent solver in parallel mode? As a user, you don't have to know about parallel programming in order to run Fluent in parallel. The only thing you need to understand is the process and command on how to submit the parallel Fluent jobs. The default setting in the software usually gives you the most optimum performance. Being a well parallelised computational fluid dynamics solver, Fluent will partition and execute the job in multiple CPUs automatically and efficiently. Please click here to read the full article to learn more about the parallel processing capabilities of Fluent. Feel free to write to should you have any questions.

Users of Analyze medical volume rendering and visualisation software may be glad to know that the latest version of Analyze (version 6.0) comes with the Insight Toolkit modules (ITK). ITK is an open-source toolkit of advanced filter, segmentation and registration algorithms contributed by leading scientists and institutions around the world under sponsorship by the National Library of Medicine as part of their Visible Human Project. The modules included in Analyze are: ITK Filter Module, ITK Segment Module, ITK Seg 3D module and ITK Registration Module.

Also new since version 5.0 is the ability of the Surface Extractor to save the generated surfaces to more file formats, including Patran *.out files. SVU users can now directly generate their Patran models from their medical images via Analyze.

For more information, write to .

MS Modeling 3.0 is Materials Studio's suite of modeling and simulation tools that can be applied in computational materials science research in reducing lead-times, increasing understanding, and screening candidate materials. It can be used in the analysis of products and processes from nanotechnology to bulk chemical production, as it provides tools for the study of materials at various length and time scales.

MS Modeling 3.0 products enable researchers to:

• Construct models and predict properties of molecules, crystalline materials, and polymers.
• Simulate the properties of gas phase, solvent and solids (including interfaces and surfaces) with density functional theory quantum mechanical codes.
• Predict structures and properties with molecular mechanics and dynamics method.
• Study the long length and time behavior of complex fluid systems.
• Simulate the phase diagrams.
• Simulate powder diffraction patterns, with indexing and refinement capabilities.
• Identify compounds with optimal physicochemical properties.

MS Modeling 3.0 is available in SVU now. The client-server architecture of MS Modeling 3.0 enables you to create scenarios on Windows-based PCs, perform those calculations on the high-performance Itanium 2 systems, and then view the results back on the PC. This architecture enables collaboration, making it easy to readily share this information with colleagues. Please check this webpage for more information http://www.nus.edu.sg/comcen/svu/techinfo/ms_modeling_3.htm or write to if you have any queries.

The answer depends very much on the size and the type of application you are running. To find out more please read on ...