SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT:
Strategic Cooperation in
High Performance
Computing for Image Processing and Multi-Media Databases
Anno Jordan, I. Cechowicz
email: jordan@parsytec.de
Parsytec Computer GmbH, Auf der Huels 183, 52068 Aachen
A. Bogdanov, Yu. Gorbachev
International Institute for Interphase Interactions (IIII)
Russia is step by step integrated into world's
economy. One of the necessary steps that should be done on this
way is joining the world's information space. Russia is solving
this problem fastly by creating its own networks and informational
servers and by providing the links to the world's networks.
One of the attempts in this direction is based
on the supercomputing, server and communication facilities of
the International Institute for Interphase Interactions (IIII).
By the moment, on the basis of these facilities,
a positive experience have been accumulated in the field of education
and retraining mainly [1]. The computer and communication resources
of the IIII allow:
2. THE IIII.
The International Institute for Interphase
Interactions (IIII) was founded in St.Petersburg, Russia, in September
1991 as a nongovernmental non-profit-making scientific and research
institution, and headed from the very beginning by professor Alexander
V. Bogdanov.
The necessity of deep interdisciplinary integration
of various separated groups in different areas of science and
technology is now widely recognized. That's why the main goal
of this Institute establishment was to integrate the scientific
abilities of highly skilled Russian scientists and experts dealing
with informational systems as well as with physics, mathematics,
mechanics, chemistry and ecology. In particular, the most important
problem is to coordinate their activities addressed to the resolution
of fundamental and applied problems of physical and mathematical
modeling for interphase interactions as well as for the application
of obtained results.
Besides, the IIII committed itself to organize
the retraining courses for specialists engaged in the above mentioned
areas of industry, to provide them with the advanced training
and education for the high skilled specialists through the exchange
of postgraduate and postdoctoral programs for both Russian and
foreign residents.
For the successful development of such a complex
and vast program the IIII was based on the new principles of the
science organization in Russia. Some of them concist in preventing
the creation a gigantic institutions, and in refusal to maintain
a non-flexible internal structures.
The IIII Education and Retraining Centre was
registered by the EEC COMNET program authorities. Recently the
Institute has become the Corresponding member and the Pilot Centre
for Eastern Europe guided by the ERCOFTAC organization in Lausanne,
Switzerland.
The above mentioned principles make it possible
to carry out the fundamental researches, according to the long-term
programs proposed by the IIII Scientific Council, to meet operatively
current demands of both national and foreign scientific institutions,
companies and firms and to create for this reason some temporal
IIII research teams (laboratories) based on the contract system
for solving particular fundamental and applied problems.
The continuous development of the IIII in present
time, that is not a very simple one for the Russian science, is
based primarily on the world famous scientific achievements of
the IIII fellows in various areas. They can be found in the field
of elementary processes, physical and chemical kinetics, in bulk
and interfaces, in relaxation gas dynamics and computations of
complex gasdynamical flows with different physical processes,
including combustion, catalytic reactions, kinetic DSMC calculations
and mathematical modeling of film growth processes, as well as
in computer simulation and in the artificial intelligence system
design and also in various fields of programming. The IIII also
supports reliable sci entific collaboration with the leading scientific
and training centres of Russia as well as with a number of foreign
scientific centres, to say nothing about the broad individual
contacts inside the world scientific community. Aspects mentioned
above provide for the IIII the unique position of being the new
wave research centre trying to promote international scientific
cooperation.
The IIII is equipped with the most powerful
supercomputer cluster in Russia consisting of three high-performance
computers from CONVEX: C120, C3820 and C3440. Computer centre
is a quickly developing structure having now the Ethernet network,
that unites supercomputers and links them with Unix stations (Sun,
HP, MicroVax). C3820 supercomputer is used as a regional fileserver
in the framework of the RUNNet network and is planned to be used
as one for the future RBnet network.
The IIII long-term research programs are conformed
with the last years activities of its fellows, having represented
different results and products. They were demonstrated in the
framework of various conferences, workshops, seminars, published
reports, articles, books, computer simulation software, etc.
As a whole, the IIII is orientated to mutual
and continuous cooperation and assistance between modern scientific,
technological and educational projects around the world.
On the basis of the IIII, the new state institution
was established in February 1996. This is the Institute for High-Performance
Computing and Data Bases (ICB). The research work financed by
the Ministry of Science and Technical Policy of Russian Federation
will be carried out in this new Institute whilst the IIII will
remain the coordinating centre for cooperation within the scope
of national and international research programs and projects.
The ICB has rapidly became the head institution on supercomputing
in Russia.
The WWW-server of the IIII is under active
construction nowadays. Having contacted it, one may know about
the Institute, how to get access to the data and calculating resources,
the CONVEX parallel vector computation technique, etc. The server
is available on http://www.csa.ru.
3. SERVER FACILITIES.
The computing and communication resources of
both these Institutes lay in the basis of Joint Supercomputer
Centre.
Up to now one of the main limiting factor in computer networks development, data and knowledge bases development and organizing large scale work on multimedia and graphic educational programs was the absence of powerful host computers in the academic institutions. For example, the Informational network of the Union of Scientific Organizations of North-West worked on VAX VT-320 with relatively weak Motorolla 68030 processor and had only 1500 MB of Memory. Although it gave a full scale service to its users, it is quite clear that the number of users have to be limited to the headquarters of Scientific Community to provide all range of services, or the mainframe should be upgraded.
CONVEX C3820 of the IIII is the first powerful host, that makes this Institute the natural leader in organizing academic network with complete list of services available for any user. CONVEX offers access to a wide variety of connectivity standards, such as HYPERchannel, ULTRAnet, Ethernet, TCP/IP etc. CONVEX super file servers meet the needs of file operations and mass storage demands. XWindow system provides all the possibilities for distributed applications and familiar graphic user interfaces.
That makes the Joint Supercomputer Centre of
the IIII and ICB available to provide to every working place wide
variety of services:
and others. We feel, this Centre will be important
vehicle for providing connection between Russian and European
scientific and educational organizations.
The Centre is mainly aimed at serving the institutions
of the Ministry of Science and Technical Politics and the Committee
of High Education. On its basis, the specific both scientific
and informational demands are to be satisfied, such as the support
of specialized networks (HEPNet - high energy physics net, ASTRONet
- astronomy net, MATHNet, etc.). Beside the communication and
data base facilities, its powerful resources are successfully
used for calculations, including remote ones.
4. COMMUNICATION FACILITIES.
Through the computing resources of the IIII
the user may get access to the RBnet and RUNNet networks as well
as the new supercomputer network.
RBnet is a large network project aimed at the
whole-Russia academic net accessibility. Up to now, the national
connection structure has been pretty fragmentary and mainly defined
by the topology and net exchange of several large service providers
(Relcom, RUNNet, etc). By the moment few big linked domains have
been formed, and dealing with corresponding service-provider is
required to get an access.
RBnet final purpose is an integrated media
of information exchange which allows to solve efficiently the
tasks like these:
To fulfill the tasks mentioned above, RBnet
should satisfy to requirements as follows:
Two main network "architectures"
lay in the basis of these requirements:
The net is based on the core routers (RBR)
situated in the basic access points (BAP) and connected by high-speed
digital data transfer channels. The use of high-reliable on-land
channels is preferable.
The core router is connected to the Regional
Internet eXchange (RIX) which may be certain in its architecture
but is to provide the media transparent for internet exchange
for:
RIX may be the part of a BAP or a regional
infrastructure.
The RBnet routing policy defines that each
linked domain connected to a BAP is accessible from all the linked
domains connected to RBnet.
RUNNet is the federal university network which
is aimed at the united information area for education and science
of Russian Federation and its integration to the world information
community.
RUNNet is based on principals as follows:
RUNNet federal nodes provide the connection
of regional network and interact with independent service providers
on the Point to Point Peering or Internet Exchange Peering schemes.
RUNNet has the gate to the Internet according to the agreement
with the Scandinavian united academician network NORDUnet.
Beside RBnet and RUNNet common facilities,
the user of the IIII computing resources may have an access to
the supercomputer network which is being built now. This network
is to unite 7 supercomputer clusters all in all (2 in St.-Petersburg
and 5 in Moscow) which are planned to be connected by the 150
Mbits channel.
5. TELE-COOPERATION IN SCIENCE AND
EDUCATION
The new partnership programs via INTERNET will
help to build an institutionalized distance cooperation facilities
as well as learning programs and teach critical knowledge and
skills to a wide scope of researchers and students. The partnerships
among the academic teams, scientific associations, training firms
and universities will be forged and cooperative arrangements with
the telecommunications service providers established. Several
projects will conduct courses in Russia to the target sectors
by distance learning and concurrently develop links and institutionalize
distance collaboration between Russia and Europe with links to
the U.S.
IIII is a leader not only in High-Performance
Computing and Distance Learning in Russia, but also in wider field
of computer science (artificial intelligence, egs.) and theoretical
physics. It has pioneered sophisticated distance learning on these
topics.
All programs will be delivered to the Ministry
of Science and Technical Policy as requested. In Russia IIII will
provide the communications service as an extensive cluster of
telecommunications courses both in basic studies, computer science
and in management, policy, privatization, regulation and technology.
Programs in distance learning will be addressed the various regional
sites throughout Russia.
IIII works at the premises and in close contact
with St.Petersburg State Technical University, which is one the
oldest, largest, and most prestigious technical university in
Russia. It has has special departments for Life-Long Education,
for continuing education and Distance Education Center. It has
cooperative agreements with 32 European and American Universities.
The partnership is succesful, but tele-cooperation will serve
as a great impact to it effectiveness.
6. CONCLUSIONS.
The International Institute for Interphase
Interaction has become now one of the best equipped centres for
wide future scientific cooperation in various research work under
both Russian and EEC programs. The server facilities of the IIII
allow to support the necessary information service and data bases.
The communication facilities make accessible the all-Russia educational
and scientific networks. The supercomputer resources may provide
users with significant calculating power.
SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT:
Strategic Cooperation
in High Performance Computing for Image Processing and Multi-Media
Databases
Anno Jordan, I. Cechowicz
email: jordan@parsytec.de
Parsytec Computer GmbH, Auf der Huels 183, 52068 Aachen
A. Bogdanov, Yu. Gorbachev
International Institute for Interphase Interactions (IIII)
Based on the existing and expanding activities
of the IIII and ICB, a strategic co-operation agreement was finalized
in spring 1996 between IIII, Parsytec Computer GmbH, Aachen and
Parsytec St. Petersburg.
Parsytec designs and markets very high speed
image processing building blocks, based on advanced recognition
software and scalable parallel processing HW based on PC technology.
Main applications are document pro cessing, e.g. postal automation
or reading handwritten documents, semiconductor quality control,
surface inspection, explosive detection in airline baggage, medical
imaging, etc.
Besides that Parsytec provides generic parallel
processing platforms for research centres and universities. Parsytec
is involved in more than 15 EU Projects with focus on image processing
and related areas. Through its coordinating role in the ACTS Projects
SICMA (Scalable Interactive Continuous Media Servers Design and
Application) and SICMA-EAST (Extension to Eastern Europe), a close
co-operation with the IIII/ICB has been a natural result of Parsytec
St. Petersburg activities in Russia.
The further development of the SICMA server
technology by Russian partners to a system which archives an huge
amount (thousands) of Russian masterpieces (pictures) in digital
format is the main objective of SICMA-East. The server will be
able to deliver those digitized pictures to telecommunication
networks using Internet/WWW standards via standard, ATM, ISDN
and satellite networks in Russia and Western Europe.
During the last months staff of IIII has been
trained in Germany for system handling and maintainance and the
IIII will provide a testbed for the SICMA-East application for
the whole Russia via RUNNet.
Currently a first high performance computer
system with 16 processors and a performance of 4 GFLOPS is under
installation at IIII. This installation is completely financed
by Russian resources and demonstrates the willingness of IIII
and the Ministry of Science and Technology to invest in advanced
technology and strategic cooperation.
The co-operation has been supported by the
recent BENEFIT Workshops and information days by the provision
of discussion fora and round tables for the planning of EU projects
and related co-operations.
LITERATURE
[1] A. Bogdanov, Y. Gorbachev. From LDE projects to joint research cooperation: some conclusions and propositions. DMM'95. Proceedings. pp. 340-345.
[2] Charlton, S. Meeting educational needs in an information society. In: G.Davies & B& Samways (eds) Teleteaching. Proceedings of the IFIO TC3 third teleteacing conference, 1993. Trondheim, Norway. Amsterdam: Elseivier Science Publishers B.V., pp. 789-795.
[3] Collis B., de Vries P. New Technologies and Learning in the European Community. T.H.E. Journal, March, 1994, pp. 23-67.
[4] Fox, G. High Performance Computing and
Communications: impact on Education. NYS Sc&T conference,
Rochester, NY, November 1993, pp. 152-167.
BENEFIT
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