Monash Sun Grid (MSG) Showcase

The MSG currently comprises 1000 CPU cores, 680 GB of RAM with a theoretical peak performance of around 1 Tflop/s. In the first eight months of 2008, the MSG has provided over 650 thousand CPU hours (75 CPU years) of HPC computing time to Monash researchers, a 150-fold increase over the closing eight months of 2006. The MSG is now a major contributor of HPC capacity to Monash research programs, of similar magnitude to that provided by external VPAC and NCI (APAC) services.

During 2008 the MSG has delivered services to over 50 Monash HPC users, spread over 6 faculties: Medicine, Engineering, Science, Arts, FIT, BusEco (and previously Pharmacy) as well as non‑faculty research groups (MCSS), and pools of grid users using the MSG via GLOBUS and FIT’s NIMROD system.  Overall average load over the period was high (over 50%), with very high sustained load periods regularly observed.

Showcase

	Ant Colony Optimisation, Dhananjay Thiruvady, Clayton School of Information Technology. This project explores the estimation of distribution algorithms, constraint programming and branch and bound techniques (beam search) for combinatorial optimisation problems. the Monash Sun Grid and the east enterprise grid. By utilising the computational power of Monash's Monash Sun Grid and East Enterprise Grid HPC infrastructure, the researchers involved with this project are able to conduct large numbers of experiments effectively, and with considerable speed.
	Bioreactor Modelling, Stuart Cogan, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering. Bioreactor Modelling research is centred around investigating the culture environment inside a novel bioreactor for tissue engineering, particularly from a fluid mechanics and mass transport perspective.
	Climate and meteorology of Earth's polar regions, Dr Petteri Uotila, School of Geography and Environmental Science. This project currently explores small (less than 2000km across) cyclones over the Southern Ocean, which represents an important element in the global circulations of heat and moisture, and therefore  the maintenance of Southern Hemisphere climate. The primary objectives of this project are to advance the understanding of atmospheric processes responsible for the development and decay of small Southern Ocean cyclones, and to explore the interactions between these cyclones and the underlying surface conditions, including sea ice extent, thickness, concentration, motion and temperature.
	Dendritic Polymers, Dr Ravi Prakash Jagadeeshan, Dr Jaroslaw T. Bosko and Tri Pham, Department of Chemical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering. The great interest in hyperbranched polymers is driven largely by the exciting possibility that their unique architecture can be exploited to produce materials with entirely new properties. In order to explore this, the researchers in this project are developing and implementing Brownian Dynamics Simulation and Molecular Dynamics algorithms using the Monash Sun Grid HPC facility. Understanding of the structure and deformation properties of novel kinds of dendritic polymers and how these relate to their flow properties will enable design and manufacture of novel materials with a wide range of applications from materials science through to medicine.
	Framework for quality of service provision in IEEE 802.11, Dr Ahmet Sekercioglu, Department of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering. This project utilises the Monash HPC facility, combined with parametric simulation methods to create an accurate estimation of patterns of access across multiple 802.11 mobile cellular networks. This allows the researchers involved to examine the way in which wireless networks operate, and to create accurate empirical models of network behaviour.
	Grain refinement, Prof Laszlo Toth, Prof Yuri Estrin, Dr Rimma Lapovok, Department of Materials Engineering. A novel technique for improving material performance is to refine the grain size to nano-range by giant plastic deformation. The new orientation mapping microscopy facilities at Monash permit now to have real insight into the grain refinement process. Polycrystal plasticity simulations are carried out on millions of grains comprising a polycrystal and compared to experiments. Modelling this process helps us to identify the major mechanisms and to propose material processing routes that provide materials for applications in micro and macro structures with exceptional performance.
	Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow in Porous Media, Gazy Al-Sumaily, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering. This project relates to numerical simulations for the problem of heat transfer and fluid flow in porous media. Due to the need to peform computational calculations requiring significant processing power, the Monash Sun Grid has been utilised to solve five coupled partial differential equations. Three of the equations are Continuity and Momentum equations that aim to estimate the velocity field inside the medium, and the another two algorithms are  energy equations for the fluid and solid phases that aim to calculate the temperature distributions through the these two phases. The objective of the project is to study the effect of some parameters such as the Reynolds number, the porosity of the domain and the boundary conditions on the hydrodynamic and thermal behaviour in the packed bed of spheres.
	Immersed Boundary Techniques, David Hillier, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Faculty of Engineering. This project is being conducted in collaboration with the FLAIR research group, and relates to the implementation of an immersed boundary technique into an existing spectral element fluid solver. An immersed boundary technique simulates the presence of an arbitrary boundary on an arbitrary underlying mesh. The benefits of this technique would be the capabilities to perform preliminary simulations of complex geometries and the simulation of moving boundaries. Access to the Monash Sun Grid would assist this project by allowing researchers to run more computationally-intensive simulations.
	Latin Squares, Dr Ian Wanless and Judith Egan, School of Mathematical Sciences. This project aims to develop the theory on important substructures of 'latin squares'. Latin squares play an important role in pure mathematics and have many applications in the areas of combinatorial design, such as event programme scheduling, statistical experiments and error correcting codes. The research team uses distributed computing, including the Monash Sun Grid, Monash Green SPONGE and Brecca  HPC facilities, as an investigative tool to find patterns which can then be turned into mathematical theorems by humans.
	Modelling Vortices, Joine So, Department of Mechanical Engineering,  Faculty of Engineering. This project investigates the instabilities of common types of engineering-related vortices,  for example those that exist within the wake of an aircraft or car. The objective of the project is to resolve the influence of the vortices to object bodies by controlling the vortices with an instability mechanism.
	Magnetohydrodynamic for Plasma-fusion Applications, Wisam Al-saadi, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering,  Faculty of Engineering. This project entails a numerical simulation for the problem of Magnetohydrodynamic plasma-fusion applications. The objective of the project is to study the stability analysis regarding the case of a confined cylinder with an axial magnetic field, and spectral element codes will be utilised for this analysis. Use of the MSG is crucial for the project, as one simulation run for a high degree of polynomial results would take days on a desktop computer, but with multiple cores the simulation time would be reduced dramatically.
	Securing Wireless Sensor Networks, Dr Ahmet Sekercioglu and Sophia Kaplantzis, Department of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering. This project explores the negative effects of malevolent hacking behaviour on Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and the data that they convey. WSNs are a new and upcoming type of wireless network, in which a large collection of small autonomous sensing devices communicate among themselves in order to monitor various phenomena that occur in the physical world around them.

Current users of the Monash Sun Grid (MSG) central Monash HPC facility