Description
Eixam and Maya are the high-performance parallel computing clusters of the Departament de Matemàtica Aplicada 1 at UPC.
Eixam (the Catalan word for "swarm") is composed of 26 Dell PowerEdge SC1425 servers, each with two Intel Xeon 3.2 GHz processors and 2 GB of RAM, for a total of 52 CPU.
Maya (introduced November 2007) is composed of 11 Acer Altos R520 servers, each with two quad-core Intel Xeon processors at 2.0 GHz and 8 GB of RAM, for a total of 88 CPU.
The servers are interconnected through a Gigabit Ethernet dedicated network.
Eixam and Maya are used for scientific computing by the EGSA research group from our Department and more in particular, the UPC Dynamical Systems group. The following research projects are involved:
- Dynamical Systems.
- Hamiltonian systems.
- Dissipative systems.
- Celestial mechanics.
- Astrodynamics, including spatial mission analysis and design.
- Infinite-dimensional systems which can be reduced to finite-dimensional.
- Partial Differential Equations. Nonlinear PDEs, fluid dynamics.
- Geometry and Topology. Algebraic geometry computations.
An essential point is the detailed study of invariant (stable and unstable) manifolds of various invariant objects (such as quasi-periodic orbits or Normally Hyperbolic Invariant Manifolds) and their relative position, as well as their dynamical implications. This is accomplished by means of both symbolic and numerical computations. All the software utilized for these applications is developed, analyzed and implemented by members of our research group. One of our main goals is to implement parallel numerical methods for our special-purpose computations. The whole group has also a large experience in applying these techniques to real life problems, like transfer of orbits and station keeping maneuvers in the analysis of several missions to ESA and NASA.
Moreover, we host a number of "invited" scientific research computations by people from outside our Department. This includes research projects in areas as diverse as
- Astrodynamics.
- Neuroscience.
- Modeling and visualization in virtual reality.
- Soft computing.
- Numerical modeling and optimization.
- Parallel algorithms.
- Nonlinear fluid dynamics.
- Statistics and applications.
Researchers from outside our Department may submit a proposal to request an allocation of cycles on our clusters. To submit a proposal to request an allocation, please contact eixam.ma1 arrobillaupc.edu
Finally, our clusters are catering not only basic research projects, but also strategic research projects from INTAS, NASA-JPL, ICREA and PROFIT.