Yale University will soon be the envy of its Ivy League cohorts, at least when it comes to computing power. It was reported in the Yale Daily News that the school has purchased a new supercomputer, one with TOP500-level chops. The marks the school’s first foray onto the much-hyped international listing of the world’s fastest computers. As of the November 2010 list, the Yale computer cluster, called “Bulldog O,” or “Omega,” earned a 146th ranking overall, and a 74th place finish among academic institutions.
The machine was purchased second-hand from Hewlett-Packard for $2 million, which school officials say is about half what an equivalent new machine would cost. As explained in the article, the cluster was built by HP for an unnamed government agency for testing in advance of purchasing a larger system. That’s what allowed the school to get such a good bargain. The parts are being shipped to Yale in stages, and will be assembled on the West Campus.
The 702-node Bulldog O cluster is capable of processing 52.53 trillion calculations per second (52.53 teraflops) and comes equipped with a petabyte of storage space. The system will be used to support a variety of scientific endeavors, in fields such as genome sequencing, astro- and geo-physics, combustion engineering and modeling protein interactions, but a good portion of its time will be devoted to climate research. Chuck Powell, associate chief information officer at Yale’s Information Technology Services, explained that one-third of machine’s capacity will be used by three Yale professors who are researching climate change. Powell added that these same climate scientists came up with a portion of the funds, also about one-third, to help pay for Yale’s newest cluster.
Yale’s decision to obtain a new computer was driven in large part by the needs of the climate researchers, but they are not the only ones benefiting from the machine. Fifty other faculty members have already been selected to use the supercomputer, and the number of users is expected to grow. Going forward, the need for advanced computational resources is clear. Yale had already seen the user base for its centrally shared computing systems grow by 170 percent over the past 20 months. In response, the university purchased Bulldogs L, M and N over the last 15 months, but was unable to get ahead of demand. As Deputy Provost for Science and Technology Steven Girvin explained: “A lot of the sciences have become driven by large computations and large data analysis. The present machines that we have are oversubscribed.” The addition of Bulldog O to the computational pool helps ensure the university meets future growth in the number of users and the amount of data.
The supercomputer is scheduled to go live at the end of April.