A brief history of the John C. Slater Computing laboratory

The Slater Lab has provided computing support for QTP since 1982 with the first computer "Max the VAX", a VAX 11/780 manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation. QTP had 25 vt100 terminals in offices to access the system. The system was funded by an NSF grant.

In 1985 an ONR grant to Dr. Bartlett allowed for the installation of an FPS-164 manufactured by Floating Poit Systems. A small VAX 11/750 served as the front-end computer and the FPS was an attache dprocessors, very much like a graphucs card in modern PCs. Except that it was a lot bigger!

In 1987 a new NSF grant allowed the acquisition of a Sun system consisting of 5 sun3/280 servers and 50 sun3/50 desktops all connected by 3 Ethernet networks over coaxial thinwire cable. One sun4/240 was upgraded to a SPARC sytem when it came out. There have been several upgrades of the Sun system both on the server side and on the desktop side.

In 1990, QTP started to work with IBM to do high performance computing on IBM POWER processors as the SUN SPARC processors lagged in floating point performance. This culmimated in 2000 in the creation of the visualization lab finded by an IBM SUR grant and an NSF MRI grant and during the years 2000-2004 in the installation of three large IBM Scalable Parallel systems Xena I, Xena II, and Xena III, obtained as grants from the Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program. Xena III was dismantled in Fall of 2005 to make room for Phase II of the UF High Performance Computing Center cluster. Currently QTP and the ACIS Lab of Prof Jose Fortes in Electrical and Computing Engineering share the IBM SP Atanasoff,

Starting 2004 with the hiring of new QTP faculty, arwen for Roitberg in 2004, haku for Hirata and ra and amun for Merz in 2005, the POWER clusters were replaced by Linux clusters with Intel architecture processors. Another IBM SUR grant added surg.

A MURI grant to Dr. Bartlett funded the acquisition of a Altix system ock configured very peculiarly for running serial ACES II with few processors and very large RAM.

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