The Atlas Centre at RAL houses the Joint Research Councils Cray supercomputer which is available to members of the UK academic community eligible for support from any of the Research Councils or the British Academy. There is also an IBM mainframe service used mainly in support of SERC scientific programmes and there are other specific activities in areas such as networking, information management and the SERC computing infrastructure.
The IBM service and other activities have continued largely in the pattern of previous years. The Cray supercomputer has been brought into service. It is beginning to make inroads into the large pent-up demand for this kind of computing in scientific and other research and is already loaded to near full capacity.
Bringing the Cray X-MP/48 into service was the major event of the year. All the installation stages took place on schedule leading to the official inauguration in April by the Rt Hon Kenneth Baker MP, Secretary of State for Education and Science. The timetable was:
| Date | Description |
|---|---|
| 3 Dec 1986 | Cray delivered |
| 12 Jan 1987 | Diagnostic testing completed |
| 1 Feb 1987 | Acceptance testing completed |
| 2 Feb 1987 | User service started |
| 30 Mar 1987 | Peer-review access started |
| 15 Apr 1987 | Formal inauguration ceremony |
The Cray operating system COS version 1.14 was installed initially and upgraded later to COS 1.15. Access to the Cray was provided from CMS by running Cray VM station software on the IBM 3081. Later in the year, a Micro VAX running VMS was connected to the Cray via the Hyperchannel and some 20 users have registered for this alternative access route. Use of the Cray by a wide range of disciplines from SERC and other Research Councils has increased steadily (Fig 5.1). By October about 110 projects were registered for access and there were 214 registered users.
The Advisory Board for the Research Councils and SERC have provided resources to establish at RAL a small group of computational scientists to help university users by providing appropriate expertise as well as carrying out research programmes internally and in collaboration with other UK institutions. Within SERC, the group aims to assist the work of the four Boards, and the Natural Environment Research Council and the Medical Research Council have agreed to attach staff. So far, the group has concentrated on universities and industry in areas which could use the power of the Cray but where there was no established framework such as the Science Board Collaborative Computational Projects (CCP) in which to operate. Meetings have been held under the auspices of the Society of British Aerospace Companies to discuss the use of the Cray in the fields of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and numerical structure modelling. The group is now closely involved in CFD simulations of hypersonic flow and has close links with several universities in CFD research.
A new CCP has been set up in the area of plasma physics, funded jointly by the Physics Committee and the Laser Facility Committee, to help coordinate university activities concerned with laser-produced plasmas and magnetic fusion plasmas. A very large 2.5-D plasma simulation model, written specifically for the Cray architecture, has been obtained from Los Alamos National Laboratory and is available for use in the UK. Other work in progress in this area is the study for the first time of the role of self generated magnetic fields in the high density region of laser targets and their effects on the Rayleigh-Taylor instability.
In an attempt to expand the application of supercomputing, contact has been made with areas as diverse as pulsar searches (involving 32 million point Fourier transforms), genetic DNA database analysis, financial modelling and regional geography.
At the beginning of the year, the three main graphics packages used in the UK were installed on the Cray, viz GKS, GINO-F and GHOST-80. To these was added the Nag Graphical Supplement (Mk 2) which provides convenient and well-proven facilities for display of scientific data. Output from the Cray may be viewed as it is produced, sent to the central hard-copy devices or stored on a front-end computer for subsequent viewing or plotting. All these facilities are available from the IBM and VAX front-ends and from the network.
A major evaluation of high power graphical workstations suitable for attachment to the Cray has been undertaken and a Silicon Graphics IRIS model 3130 installed as a result. This is being connected via a direct Hyperchannel link to the Cray and will provide exceptional facilities for display and interaction with Cray programs. It contains many specialised processors for high speed transformation and rendering of pictures.
There have been no major changes to the service provided by the IBM 3081K and the Atlas 10 and usage followed the pattern of last year.
In September, an extra 5 Gbyte of disk capacity was added to the IBM mainframes in the form of IBM 3380 disks, and two IBM 3480 cartridge tape drives were installed which are currently being used only for data backup but will shortly be released for general use. The tape library has 55,000 tapes and is still growing. The number of Masstor M860 cartridges allocated is nearly 650 of which 304 are used by MVS, 215 by the Cray and 82 by CMS, all for backup and migration purposes. The Service Line continued to provide a much used facility, handling well over 11,000 calls in the year, over 3500 resulting in Incident Reports analysed as follows: mainframes over 1000; minis almost 400; terminal faults 1650; the remainder spread over PADs, Pyramids and Perqs. Change Control processed some 166 system changes, of which the vast majority were made to software running in the IBM 3081 Front End system.
A unified accounting system has been developed allowing the account records of the three operating systems, COS, VM/CMS and MVS, to be stored in the same central database from where they can be accessed by all systems and users. Automatic file-space management systems were developed for COS datasets and CMS minidisks using the Masstor M860 magnetic cartridge store to give effective file-stores much larger than the disk space connected directly. Data is migrated to the M860 automatically and restored transparently when accessed interactively or from batch jobs. A new version of CMS (release 4) was installed in April and major new function has been added to the SLACBATCH system, in particular, providing remote job entry capabilities via FTP and JTMP.
Performance monitoring has been extended to include the Cray as well as the IBM mainframes and a network monitoring facility, based on an IBM Pc, was designed and developed in order to give a better idea of the response time perceived at a terminal connected to CMS via the network. A CMS benchmark was prepared and used as part of the evaluation exercise for possible replacements for the IBM mainframes.
Collaborations with external sites continued to prove fruitful, with the consolidation of a common fund of CMS and Batch software within the HEPVM (RAL, CERN, SLAC, IN2P3) collaboration and the establishment of a common user interface group (CUIG) with the other two national supercomputer centres (London and Manchester).
A host-end implementation of the Job Transfer and Manipulation Protocol was brought into service on 1 February. At the same time a user-end implementation was made available in CMS. The host-end service allows jobs to be submitted from JANET sites to the Cray and to SLACBATCH and output to be returned automatically. A pilot Simple Screen Management Protocol service was installed under CMS in April and became generally available in August. The service provides access to CMS in full-screen 3270 mode for users on JANET having the necessary user-end SSMP facilities such as an ASCII terminal connected via a Fawn Box.
The European Academic Research Network (EARN) connects universities and research institutes in Europe, Africa and the Middle East with each other and other similar networks in North America. A gateway between JANET and EARN has been implemented on the IBM 3081K at RAL and this has increased considerably the number of institutions accessible by electronic mail from UK universities.
A plan for an Ethernet local area network (LAN) at RAL was developed based on a fibre optic backbone attached by bridges to several 'village' Ethernets using standard and thin wires. The backbone and seven villages have been installed and inter-connection of these villages has begun.
Support for the mainframe service continued in parallel with the requirements of the Cray. The Program Advisory Office answered 5500 queries during the year of which 3800 were received via electronic mail. About 1400 manuals (including those written at RAL and those purchased from manufacturers for users) and over 22,000 newsletters were issued to users.
The Network Support Officer helps British academics seeking to communicate with collaborators abroad, and overseas researchers trying to establish communications with workers at UK universities, polytechnics and other establishments such as RAL. Approximately 30 such queries were dealt with each week.
There was a rapid decline in the use of the MVS system by the Nuclear Physics Board because of limited funding. This was counter-balanced to an extent by an increase in the use of SLACBATCH and there has been a general increase in the use of CMS.
Many improvements were made to the Office Systems service provided by PROFS (IBM Professional Office System). These included new facilities for managing electronic mail (LOGLIST), the use of DisplayWrite 3 on IBM personal computers, a much improved link between the spread-sheet facility and the PROFS document database allowing users to share common budgets and other financial modelling data (EPINT), and the almost complete integration of PROFS with external electronic mail (Grey book and Telex).
There has been a growth in population to almost 700 registered users and a PROFS Clinic was set up with experts making regular visits to users at RAL.
Early in 1987, a pilot project was initiated to enable SERC Central Office to use the RAL PROFS system remotely. Hardware procurement, configuration of the communications equipment and training followed rapidly and by the end of October all but a few of the 78 users in the trial were connected and using PROFS.
There has been a dramatic increase in the use of SQL/DS (the IBM relational database system for the CMS environment). This has led to the need for advice, assistance and training for users and improvements in performance and reliability.
The VM/CMS version of the full text retrieval package STATUS has been developed under contract to Harwell Computer Power - the company formed during 1987 to market and develop STATUS.
There has been further development of the RAL Financial Data System. This now takes data on a weekly basis from the RAL accounting system and makes it available to project managers in an easily used form. In addition, staff-to-project information is being included.
A collaboration with Research Councils in Italy and France is setting up a heterogeneous distributed database of information on research grants supported by the governments in those countries. The database systems for the RAL World Data Centre C1 for Solar Terrestrial Physics and the Geophysical Data Facility have been developed further in response to user requirements as the number of users increases. The AMPTE database system has been used extensively with work done to provide derived information on spacecraft separation.
About 120 IBM PCs are installed at RAL. A major use is for office automation since the machine provides both word processing and access to PROFS. Now that the new IBM PS/2 machines are diverging from the PC standard to which much RAL software and hardware is built, other suppliers are being recommended.
A support service is provided for VAX computers which have been funded by SERC at RAL and universities. Installations have good access to a pool of high grade expertise almost instantaneously. The main area of support is for communications software which is complex and difficult to deal with. A repository for public domain software has recently been set up to avoid the need to have it available on all sites. Development of the GIFT project for providing file transfer between various networks has continued. A trial service on the second stage has been introduced, enabling CERN DECnet users to initiate file transfers to JANET machines.
The main task has been the integration of the graphics facilities including the upgrade of the RAL GKS (Graphical Kernel System) from version 7.2 to 7.4 on IBM, VAX and Cray systems. This has brought about the alignment of RAL and most of its collaborators on a single graphics system, permitting exchange of programs and programmers in a way never achieved before. Included in the new system are handlers for the Computer Graphics Metafile (CGM - another International Standard) and explicit handlers for all the RAL hard-copy devices: the Xerox 8700 laser printer, IBM 4250 electro-erosion printers and Versatec ECP 42 colour plotter (Fig 5.2).
Access to the Versatec was improved and a program (GKSMVIEW) made available for viewing GKS metafiles at terminals. Projects to develop handlers for two major ranges of graphics device - Tektronix 41xx and 42xx terminals and IBM graphics screens- are nearing completion. Besides the existing means of access to the central hardcopy devices, a link has been developed between the Medusa CAD package running on Prime computers at RAL and the Versatec colour plotter. This will allow output to be plotted to BO size (1 m × 1.4 m) in full colour. Use of the Versatec has grown considerably during the year, a large fraction for RAL microcircuit design.
In July the Joint Network Team published a strategy for replacing the interim non-proprietary networking standards used in the UK academic community with full International Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) Standards. This strategy places the community in a strong position with respect to OSI, allowing it to exploit the availability of products conforming to the new standards via a gradual transition without destabilising established services or reducing the extensive inter-working capability which now exists.
Steady progress has been achieved in the improvements to the JANET sub-network under the management of the Network Executive. The reliability of the service has continued to improve and progress has been made in tuning the network to enhance the throughput of large file transfers. The major performance upgrade to complement the supercomputer initiative has passed the testing phase and is now being installed on the service network. Attention is now focused on upgrading access lines and in enhancing the network service to support X.25(1984), an essential requirement of the OSI transition.
