HPCwire: TACC Receives $59 Million NSF Award For Sun Supercomputer

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September 29, 2006

TACC Receives $59 Million NSF Award For Sun Supercomputer

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University of Texas, Arizona State University, Cornell University and Sun Microsystems to deploy the world's most powerful general-purpose computing system on the TeraGrid

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has made a five-year, $59 million award to the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin to acquire, operate and support a high performance computing system that will provide unprecedented computational power to the nation's research scientists and engineers.

"This is a very valuable resource for the scientific community and society in general," said William Powers Jr., president of the university. "This award confirms that The University of Texas at Austin is an innovative leader in high performance computing and research." The award is the largest NSF award ever to The University of Texas at Austin.

The University of Texas at Austin project team is led by Dr. Jay Boisseau, director of TACC, and includes leading researchers from TACC and the Institute for Computational Engineering & Sciences (ICES). UT Austin, in collaboration with Sun Microsystems, Arizona State University and Cornell Theory Center (CTC) at Cornell University, submitted the proposal in response to the NSF's High Performance Computing System Acquisition Program's inaugural competition. The program is designed to deploy and support world-class high performance computing systems with tremendous capacity and capability to empower the U.S. research community. The award covers the acquisition and deployment of the new Sun system and four years of operations and support to the national community to enhance leading research programs. TACC will be the lead partner, with assistance from ICES, ASU and CTC in the areas of applications optimization, large-scale data management, software tools evaluation and testing, and user training and education.

High performance computing has become a vital investigative tool in many science and engineering disciplines. It enables testing and validation of theories and analysis of vast volumes of experimental data generated by modern scientific instruments, such as the very high-energy particle accelerators in the United States and Europe. HPC makes it possible for researchers to conduct experiments that would otherwise be impossible -- studying the dynamics of the Earth's climate in the distant past, for example, investigating how the universe developed, or discovering how complex biological molecules mediate the processes that sustain life. In industry, high performance computing is used in everything from aircraft design and improvement of automobile crash-worthiness, to the creation of breath-taking animations in the cinema and production of snack food.

The NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) coordinates and supports the acquisition, development and provision of state-of-the-art cyberinfrastructure resources, tools and services essential to 21st century science and engineering research and education, including HPC systems. The TeraGrid, sponsored by OCI, integrates a distributed set of high capability computational, data management and visualization resources to enable and accelerate discovery in science and engineering research, making research in the United States more productive. The new Sun HPC system at TACC will become the most powerful computational resource in the TeraGrid.

Juan Sanchez, vice president for research at UT Austin, said the new supercomputer will enable a new wave of research and researchers. "The Texas Advanced Computing Center is highly qualified to manage this powerful system, which will have a deep impact on science," Sanchez said. "The scale of the hardware and its scientific potential will influence technology research and development in many areas, and the results and possibilities will contribute to increasing public awareness of high performance computing. In addition, the project team is deeply committed to training the next generation of researchers for using HPC resources."

TACC is partnering with Sun Microsystems to deploy a supercomputer system specifically developed to support very large science and engineering computing requirements. In its final configuration in 2007, the supercomputer will have a peak performance in excess of 400 teraflops, making it one of the most powerful supercomputer systems in the world. It will also provide over 100 terabytes of memory and 1.7 petabytes of disk storage. The system is based on Sun Fire x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers and Sun StorageTek disk and tape storage technologies, and will use over 13,000 of AMD's forthcoming quad-core processors. It will be housed in TACC's new building on the J.J. Pickle Research Campus in Austin, Texas.

This system marks Sun's largest HPC installation to-date. "Sun's new supercomputer and storage technologies create a powerful combination that will allow TACC to build and operate a supercomputer delivering more than 400 teraflops," said Marc Hamilton, director of HPC Solutions, Sun Microsystems. "We are excited about extending our long standing relationship with TACC with this system, making it possible for scientists and engineers to reap the benefits of one of the world's most powerful supercomputers." Kevin Knox, AMD's vice president for worldwide commercial business, said, "The design and performance of the AMD Opteron processor and our planned quad-core processor roadmap have been integral in supplying the best option for high performance computing deployments to customers such as Sun to provide to businesses, universities and government research centers."

"The new Sun system will provide unmatched capability and capacity for scientific discovery for the open research community," Boisseau said. "The technologies in the new Sun systems will enable breakthrough performance on important science problems." Added Tommy Minyard, assistant director for advanced computational systems at TACC and the team project manager, "With tremendous and balanced processor, memory, disk, and interconnect capabilities, this powerful system will enable both numerically-intensive and large scale data applications in many scientific disciplines."

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