Wht's this ?
Welcome to HMCS-G 1.1 Trial Kit! This kit contains client library for
HMCS-G, documents and sample program to use it. HMCS-G is an environment
for hybrid computing with general purpose and special purpose machines
for astrophysics computation. With this trial kit, you can access GRAPE-6,
the world fastest gravity calculation engine, which is installed at Center for Computational Physics,
University of Tsukuba, Japan with very simple registration and
without any charge.
CAUTION: GRAPE-6 system is originally developed by University of Tokyo. GRAPE-6 which can be accessed in HMCS-G and this trial kit is installed at Center for Computational Physics, University of Tsukuba and supported by HMCS-G research team at the center. You cannot access GRAPE-6 system at University of Tokyo in HMCS-G environment.
What's HMCS-G ?
There are two classes of machines in HMCS-G environment. The first one
is a general purpose machine for any calculation except gravity, such as
Linux PC, cluster, MPP or vector machine. Another one is the special
gravity engine, GRAPE-6. These two systems communicate via OmniRPC,
which is a Grid-RPC system, to send the gravity calculation request and
receive its result.
On HMCS-G, GRAPE-6 server provides very high computational power on a set of given particles up to 500,000 for complete N-body gravity calculation which requires O(N2) computation. You can use the system not only just for gravity calculation but also for combining your algorithm including gravity calculation. For example, if you want to simulate a system with a combination of hydrodynamics and gravity calculation, run a program for hydrodynamics on your own machine (as a general purpose side) and call a request of gravity calculation to GRAPE-6 in that program with HMCS-G client API (Application Programming Interface).
Currently, we support the API routines of HMCS-G clients written in C language. However, if you describe some wrapping function which calls our API routines indirectly, you can use this service in any language you want such as Fortran.
OmniRPC is a grid-RPC which enables Remote Procedure Call across different sites without sharing account information. For the authentication of access permission of service, both Globus and SSH are supported by OmniRPC. This trial kit only supports SSH authentication. A special account to access HMCS-G server is given for trial use with this kit.
hmcs-service@ccs.tsukuba.ac.jp
The official home page of HMCS-G project is:
http://www.ccs.tsukuba.ac.jp/people/Research/HMCSG/