New NCSA Cluster among World's Fastest Supercomputers

released 08.04.03

Contact

Trish Barker NCSA Public Information Specialist tlbarker@ncsa.uiuc.edu 217.265.8013

CHAMPAIGN, IL  — The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) will install an Intel Xeon-based Linux cluster from Dell with a peak performance of 17.7 teraflops (17.7 trillion calculations per second), NCSA Director Dan Reed announced today.

This new cluster will be one of the world's fastest supercomputers, compared to the peak performance of the machines listed on the most recently released Top 500 list, http://www.top500.org/.

The cluster will provide a boost in productivity for the researchers who use NCSA computing facilities to investigate many of science's most important questions—the large-scale structure of the universe, the properties of stars, the flow of fluids through channels, the dynamics of biological systems, the design of engineering structures, and the nature of matter itself.

"This cluster's performance will plant us firmly as the world leader in using off-the-shelf commodity microprocessors to create supercomputers," said Reed. "Deployment of this system will be an important milestone for enhancing scientific discovery via computational science, and it will demonstrate the computing capability that can be provided to the research community through Linux clusters."

The new cluster will employ more than 1,450 dual-processor Dell PowerEdge 1750 servers running Red Hat Linux, a Myrinet 2000 high-speed interconnect fabric, an I/O subcluster with more than 120 terabytes of DataDirect storage, and a dedicated 64-node applications development environment.

The cluster will offer more than 2,900 Intel Xeon 3.06 GHz processors, many more than have been available in any single NCSA cluster to date. It will be particularly useful for applications that can exploit its high clock rate and front-side bus speed of 533 MHz. The architecture of the Xeon processor will also use Intel's hyper-threading technology, which lets different elements of the chip work simultaneously for faster performance.

"Standards-based high-performance computing clusters are steadily replacing proprietary platforms for supercomputing at the world's leading academic institutions, research laboratories, and corporations," said John Mullen, sales vice president for Higher Education at Dell. "They are providing customers with impressive performance and significantly lower cost. NCSA is an outstanding example of this trend, and we're delighted to be providing what will be the largest cluster to-date at this world-class research facility."

The first servers for the applications development subcluster are being deployed now and the full-scale cluster is scheduled to be available to a select group of early users in the fall, with broad community access early in 2004.

Deployment of the Dell Xeon cluster will increase NCSA's aggregate computing resources to more than 23 teraflops, including a 2-teraflop Itanium 2 Linux cluster that is part of the TeraGrid system and is expected to enter production by the end of the year. An additional 8-teraflop Linux cluster, also part of the TeraGrid system, will be delivered in the fall, bringing NCSA's total computing power to 31 teraflops.

NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) is a national high-performance computing center that develops and deploys cutting-edge computing, networking and information technologies. Located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, NCSA is funded by the National Science Foundation. Additional support comes from the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, private sector partners and other federal agencies. For more information, see http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/.