he 5,000-processor, high-performance computing cluster that hummed into operation at UD early this year has been named “Mills” in honor of the professor emeritus and Internet pioneer.
“The University of Delaware is proud to name its new computing cluster in honor of Prof. David L. Mills, whose influence on and contributions to computing, networking, and computer engineering at the University and whose contributions to the development of the protocols behind the Internet itself cannot be overstated,” said Carl Jacobson, vice president for Information Technologies (IT).
As part of the group of researchers who helped build the Internet, Mills once said in an interview that the project “was great fun.”
“The strangest thing about the whole process is that we were inventing email, file transfer protocols and remote interactive access, using the very infrastructure that we were developing,” Mills said. “In other words, we were building the infrastructure so that we could build the infrastructure. I learned the most important lesson of my life from this experience — that people who are actually going to use services should be the ones to build them.”
Mills is the first in a series of high-performance computing clusters that IT plans to build collaboratively with UD faculty to improve research computing, Jacobson said.
Assembled by Penguin Computing, the cluster features 200 compute nodes with 5,136 processor cores, over 14 terabytes of RAM, and about 200 terabytes of disk space.
Fifty faculty stakeholders from 19 different UD departments or research centers purchased the compute nodes, and IT funded the storage, switch, maintenance, and physical and staff infrastructure.
Dion Vlachos, Elizabeth Inez Kelley Professor of Chemical Engineering and director of the Catalysis Center for Energy Innovation, said the Mills cluster will help the center develop sustainable energy applications.
“The simulations run on the cluster will facilitate the design of new catalysts to enable chemical transformations that can turn biomass into valuable plastics and fuels,” Vlachos said.
Gregory A. Miller, professor and chair of the Department of Psychology, anticipates that the Mills cluster will aid his research on brain mechanisms in human cognition, human emotions and mental illness.
“Analysis of brain images takes a huge amount of computer resources,” he said. “The new Mills cluster will help us move our research along much faster.”