During my education at CalPoly Humboldt, I was able to help program the supercomputer "Fusion" and build its successor "Helios". Aptly named, the first scientific research supercomputer was originally built to compute simulations of fusion. And now Helios has been built to throw more compute power at the problem, as well as other problems we want to try!
Fusion's hardware consisted of 192 CPU cores, and 11 Tesla k20 GPU's. And Helios consists of 512 CPU cores, and 16 k80 GPU's. That is to say, that the super computers have super amounts of compute power behind it. I am privileged to be able to have helped program and build Fusion and Helios. So I am writing these write-ups and docs for you future people to be able to do the same or at least make use of the raw compute power it provides!
What I did/am doing
I joined the small team (roughly 4-8 of us, including the 2 professors) in the Fall of 2023. I wasn't involved Fusion's hardware build, but the team and I got the software and systems needed to make use of it set up. I came into this project knowing very little about things like the Linux subsystems, DHCP, SFTP, parallel programming, and more. But I will come out of this project having learned it all from pure hands-on experience, with the absolutely wonderful mentorship from Ken Owens and Tim Lauck. I am forever in debt to them!
Now in Spring of 2024, the team and I are working on building and programming Helios, the new supercomputer! Using what was learned from Fusion we are making a much more professional, complete, and performant supercomputer.
Projects done on Fusion
Primarily, Fusion has been used to compute 1d simulations of fusion. However, it has also been used to compute other things. For example, one senior (graduated 2023 I believe) used it to compute the fractals such as the Mandelbrot set.
Related Documents
Below are different write-ups and docs I have done for the supercomputer, Fusion.
If you are looking to make a supercomputer, or just wanting to explore parallel computing or utilizing multiple computers for your code, explore the docs folder.
If you are looking to get started with Fusion or Helios, and actually run some code on it, explore some of the guides outside the docs.
Happy hacking! -- Andrew Gallimore