June 23, 2008
FAYETTEVILLE, Ark., June 23 -- Star of Arkansas, a supercomputer operated by the University of Arkansas and the most powerful computer in the state, has been listed as one of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers.
Each year, the global high-performance computing community announces the TOP500, a list of the world's most powerful computers. At this year's International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany, Star of Arkansas was ranked at No. 339. The university is one of only 33 entries from U.S. academic institutions to make the list.
"The Star of Arkansas is enabling a new level of research at the University of Arkansas and across the state," said Amy Apon, professor of computer science and engineering and director of high-performance computing at the university. "For example, the memory capacity of this supercomputer has allowed one of our researchers to complete a complex job overnight. This same task would have taken a year on a regular workstation. Other projects have been reduced from weeks on a previous supercomputer to days on Star of Arkansas. These are exciting results."
In high-performance computing, processing speed is measured in floating-point operations per second, commonly referred to as flops. Star of Arkansas has a sustained performance of 10.75 teraflops per second. "Tera" stands for a trillion, which means that Star of Arkansas has a processing speed of close to 11 trillion floating-point operations per second.
In contrast, the Roadrunner supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, is the fastest supercomputer in the world. It performs at more than 1 petaflops, or a quadrillion floating-point operations per second. This is the first year that the TOP500 has included a supercomputer that operates at petaflops speed.
Star of Arkansas enables research projects in computer science, physics, chemistry and other areas. It helps scientists and engineers design and execute vastly more complicated experiments, models and simulations than previously possible. The computer also is used for massive data storage and complex computations.
Star of Arkansas was funded in part by an $803,306 grant from the National Science Foundation. Substantial matching funds were provided by the university, in partnership with Dell Corp.
Star of Arkansas is the university's second supercomputer. The first supercomputer, Red Diamond, was installed in 2005 and is still in use.
For more information about the TOP500, visit http://www.top500.org/. For more information about high-performance computing at the university, go to http://hpc.uark.edu/ or watch a video about installation of Star of Arkansas.
-----
Source: University of Arkansas
In quieter times, sounding the bell of funding big science with big systems tends to resonate further than when ears are already burning with sour economic and national security news. For exascale's future, however, the time could be ripe to instill some sense of urgency....
Read more...
In a recent solicitation, the NSF laid out needs for furthering its scientific and engineering infrastructure with new tools to go beyond top performance, Having already delivered systems like Stampede and Blue Waters, they're turning an eye to solving data-intensive challenges. We spoke with the agency's Irene Qualters and Barry Schneider about..
Read more...
Large-scale, worldwide scientific initiatives rely on some cloud-based system to both coordinate efforts and manage computational efforts at peak times that cannot be contained within the combined in-house HPC resources. Last week at Google I/O, Brookhaven National Lab’s Sergey Panitkin discussed the role of the Google Compute Engine in providing computational support to ATLAS, a detector of high-energy particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Read more...
May 23, 2013 |
The study of climate change is one of those scientific problems where it is almost essential to model the entire Earth to attain accurate results and make worthwhile predictions. In an attempt to make climate science more accessible to smaller research facilities, NASA introduced what they call ‘Climate in a Box,’ a system they note acts as a desktop supercomputer.
Read more...
May 22, 2013 |
At some point in the not-too-distant future, building powerful, miniature computing systems will be considered a hobby for high schoolers, just as robotics or even Lego-building are today. That could be made possible through recent advancements made with the Raspberry Pi computers.
Read more...
May 16, 2013 |
When it comes to cloud, long distances mean unacceptably high latencies. Researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany examined those latency issues of doing CFD modeling in the cloud by utilizing a common CFD and its utilization in HPC instance types including both CPU and GPU cores of Amazon EC2.
Read more...
May 15, 2013 |
Supercomputers at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) have worked on important computational problems such as collapse of the atomic state, the optimization of chemical catalysts, and now modeling popping bubbles.
Read more...
05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.
04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.
In this demonstration of SGI DMF ZeroWatt disk solution, Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI CTO, discusses a function of SGI DMF software to reduce costs and power consumption in an exascale (Big Data) storage datacenter.
The Cray CS300-AC cluster supercomputer offers energy efficient, air-cooled design based on modular, industry-standard platforms featuring the latest processor and network technologies and a wide range of datacenter cooling requirements.