HPCwire: TACC's "Lonestar" Shines

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

Leading HPC
Solution Providers

HPCwire >> Off the Wire

July 21, 2006

TACC's "Lonestar" Shines

The Dell supercomputer housed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin is on its way to becoming one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world according to researchers. The Dell Linux cluster, which is being upgraded to Dell PowerEdge 1955 blade servers, will possess a peak performance of more than 55 teraflops once the system achieves full production status on October 1.

"TACC will now be able to provide the university and national research communities with access to a commodity compute cluster of unprecedented performance, enabling computational researchers to expand current models and begin to think about simulations previously not possible without a system of this size," said Chris Hempel, associate director for User Services at TACC. "We encourage researchers who have been computationally constrained to request allocations on the new system as soon as possible to be approved by October 1."

Members of the national community should apply for allocations through the National Science Foundation (NSF) TeraGrid initiative at: www.teragrid.org. Information on the types of TeraGrid allocations available and how to apply can be found at: http://www.teragrid.org/userinfo/access/accounts.php/.

New University of Texas users should apply for allocations by August 31 via the "Allocations" section of the TACC User Portal at: https://portal.tacc.utexas.edu/allocations.php/.

Lonestar will continue to serve as a key resource in the TeraGrid initiative. Sponsored by the NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure, TeraGrid is a partnership of people and a comprehensive collection of resources and services that enables and accelerates discovery in U.S. science and engineering research. Cyberinfrastructure includes supercomputers, data management systems, high capacity networks, digitally-enabled observatories and scientific instruments, and an interoperable suite of software and middleware services and tools for computation, visualization and collaboration.

"TACC is a leading national center, and the new Lonestar will be far more powerful than any systems currently in the TeraGrid. Academic researchers in Austin, in Texas, and across the nation will have greatly increased potential for knowledge discovery in all disciplines," said TACC director Jay Boisseau. "The new Lonestar will also be instrumental in our new industrial affiliates program as we seek to expand the productivity and R&D capabilities of leading companies."

In February 2006, TACC announced a significant upgrade to its top-ranked terascale cluster to Dell blade 8th generation technology, which benefited researchers who rely on this powerful system to further research innovation in the areas of computational science, engineering and technology. This next upgrade will further expand the cluster and incorporate the 9th generation of Dell server blades.

The improved architecture of the latest Intel Xeon dual-core processors and the Dell blades, combined with the high-speed InfiniBand interconnect, will result in improved performance and scalability of applications that run on Lonestar.

By the end of September, all current blades will be replaced with new blades containing state-of-the-art, dual-core Intel processors with increased floating point capability, and additional nodes will be integrated via a larger InfiniBand fabric. The resulting cluster will have 1300 nodes and offer much greater performance and memory to enhance research capabilities.

-----

Source: Faith Singer-Villalobos; TACC

Article Tools

Share & Save Options

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCWire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCWire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Feature Articles

'Coopetition' Helps the UK HPC Market Go 'Round

The size and diversity of the HPC market in the United States supports a varied set of system providers and integrators. But in Europe, and the United Kingdom in particular, the market has a different shape.
Read More...

The Week in Review

PRACE to evaluate petaflops prototypes; Acadamic roundtable discusses the computing industry's talent pool; and WRF benchmark data are released. John West recaps those stories and more in our weekly wrap-up.
Read More...

Semantic Supercomputing Reaps Competitive Advantage from Patent Data

Since the first patent was issued for a Venetian statue in 1471, 60 million patents have been awarded around the world, with four million patents actively in force today worldwide. And 800,000 new inventions are registered every year. While the data is public, current search tools are inconvenient and inadequate to the needs of professionals. Semantic supercomputing techniques are helping researchers tackle this difficult challenge.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

25 Years of Conventional Evaluation of Data Analysis Proves Worthless In Practice

Sep 05 | Uppsala University | Swedish researchers are revealing that "intelligent" computer-based methods for classifying patient samples is worthless when it comes to practical problems. Read more...

Three Dimensional Scans Could Revolutionise Brain Surgery

Sep 03 | Telegraph.co.uk | A new form of three dimensional scans could revolutionise brain surgery within a year, doctors claim. Read more...

Marching Penguins: Monitoring Your HPC Cluster

Sep 03 | Linux Magazine | In HPC, most attention is paid to utilization and performance, rather than service availability and problem notification. This article focuses on the latter Read more...

Big Data: Welcome to the Petacentre

Sep 03 | Nature News | What does it take to store bytes by the tens of thousands of trillions? Read more...

UD Scientist Finds Quicker Computer On-Ramp

Sep 01 | Delaware Online | In the world of supercomputer-powered science, speed is everything, and an open road can lead to the promised land. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server for High Performance Computing

Sep 05 | | The excellent scalability features of Linux, in addition to robust security and performance makes it an excellent choice for server systems, especially in the high performance computing area.

“Going Parallel - An Implementation Guide”

Sep 01 | | The paper outlines the basic steps and tools involved in the process of migrating a desktop application to a parallel environment.

Improving Performance and Manageability for Seismic Processing and Imaging Applications with Parallel Storage

Jun 05 | | As pressure increases on the upstream seismic processing community to deliver ever-higher levels of productivity and efficiency, a new generation of storage solutions will be required that allow the maximum utilisation of high-performance computing (HPC) Linux cluster resources, together with the minimum of management overhead.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Video White Paper: Architecting a Better Network Storage Solution

BlueArc's Titan architecture represents an evolutionary step in file servers by creating a hardware-based file system that can scale bandwidth, IOPS, and overall data capacity well beyond conventional software-based devices. With its ability to virtualize a massive storage pool of up to four usable petabytes of tiered storage, Titan can scale with growing data requirements, offering a competitive advantage for businesses, researchers, or other enterprises seeking to better manage data growth while still ensuring optimal performance.

Podcast: Interview with Ben Bennett of ClearSpeed Technology

Today, HPC organizations are requiring substantially more floating point performance to solve real-world problems. In this podcast, Ben Bennett, ClearSpeed General Manager, discusses how acceleration technology can improve the overall performance of standard x86-based systems...