New Terascale Grid To Simulate Terrorist Attacks
By Paul Shread

Purdue University and Indiana University have linked their IBM supercomputers in a computational Grid via the universities' high-speed optical network, creating a facility capable of performing a trillion operations per second.

One of the planned uses of the new terascale Grid is to simulate terrorist attacks to help government agencies prepare for worst-case scenarios.

When fully functional, the supercomputer network - referred to as the Indiana Virtual Machine Room - will be the first in the nation to tie together university-owned computers with a combined peak capacity of more than one teraflop, or more than a trillion operations per second, said James Bottum, Purdue's vice president for information technology.

The supercomputers are connected via the state's new high-performance, optical-fiber network called I-Light, which enables the exchange of large amounts of information at the speed of light. Purdue and IU tested the system for the first time last month.

The supercomputer Grid will enable researchers to perform innovative and massive new calculations, including the simulation of "synthetic environments," applications that help to predict how millions of people might react to situations ranging from product marketing to natural disasters. The terascale capability also will help scientists run complex simulations, such as those that model the behavior of materials at the atomic level or the effects of an earthquake in a metropolitan area, and it will enable the analysis of genomic data to help identify new treatments for human disease.

Combined, IU's teraflop supercomputer and Purdue's IBM supercomputer contain more than 900 processors, for a combined peak theoretical capacity of more than 1.4 teraflops.

Applications that will be explored include environments called "synthetic economies," in which the behavior of millions of consumers can be predicted for a given economic scenario. The simulations, which are based on traditional military war-gaming, enable researchers and business people to see the consequences of their decisions and actions in real time. Possible applications include simulations that predict how consumers would respond to new promotional campaigns; changes in the pricing of particular products or the introduction of new products; what would happen if companies entered each others' markets; and how changes in technology, regulatory laws or consumer demand would affect particular markets.

The software that makes the complex simulations possible was developed by Alok Chaturvedi, an associate professor of management at Purdue's Krannert School of Management, and Shailendra Mehta, director of entrepreneurism and small business outreach at the Krannert School.

"What we do in our synthetic environment is create artificial people," Chaturvedi said. "They are calibrated based on real data, and they behave just as people do in the real world. Now, what the distributed terascale environment will do is allow us to create artificial agents at very fine granularities. This advanced computing environment will enable us to create a synthetic environment that contains more elements, or more virtual people, and will provide a more accurate, detailed representation of the reality."

The terascale capability has enabled the researchers to expand the number of people in a synthetic environment into the millions, compared to hundreds for conventional applications. Terascale computation also allows synthetic environments to be changed on the fly to fit new applications, said Chaturvedi, who has been working on the software since 1993 and has used it to solve problems for the U.S. Naval Air Command, U.S. Army Recruiting Command and companies in the personal computer and agribusiness industries.

The Grid will also be used to help the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other agencies prepare for terrorist attacks. "We did a full scale simulation of a bio-terror attack in the Midwest," Mehta said, with 250,000 artificial agents representing citizens and 9 teams of human players making decisions at the government level.

Chaturvedi and Mehta eventually plan to simulate disaster scenarios that would affect the entire country, and will also model behaviors such as panic fleeing and other responses to a terrorist attack. They also will model the public's mood swings, and the lag time between the contraction of smallpox and other diseases and the appearance of symptoms.

"We are simulating a wide variety of problems related to homeland security using teragrid computing," Chaturvedi said.

Life sciences computing will also be a focus of the terascale Grid through the Indiana Genomics Initiative. The Grid has been tested with fastDNAml, a program that infers evolutionary relationships from DNA sequence data.

Purdue has recently upgraded its IBM supercomputer through the IBM Shared University Research Program, which promotes research and strengthens ties between IBM and universities. Indiana University upgraded its IBM supercomputer to just more than 1 teraflop last year, making it the largest university-owned supercomputer in the United States. The upgrade was made possible in part by a grant from IBM and funding made available for the Indiana Genomics Initiative by the Lilly Endowment.

Related Articles Grid Computing May Be Disruptive Technology, Report Says Researchers Achieve Production Grid Breakthrough News Archives