November 18, 2009
MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL, Nov. 17 -- The University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute for Advanced Computational Research (MSI) announced today its addition of HP ProLiant blade servers for a new high performance computing (HPC) system to support research across a broad range of disciplines. This powerful new system placed No. 67 on the Nov. 17 TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers.
The new system will increase MSI's high-performance computing capacity, improving its ability to support researchers at the University of Minnesota and across the state. Powered by 1,083 HP ProLiant BL280 G6 servers with 8,664 computing cores, the new supercomputer, named "Itasca" by MSI, delivers 97 teraFLOPS of theoretical computing performance -- three times the aggregate theoretical peak performance of MSI's other core computing resources.
The HP supercomputer at MSI features 24 gigabytes of RAM per node, a 40 Gb QDR InfiniBand interconnect, and more than 150 terabytes of attached storage. With a dramatic increase in its number of cores, MSI anticipates substantially improved capacity for running applications to resolve research problems.
More than 4,000 active users across a wide range of disciplines utilize MSI's diverse computational resources, making MSI a focal point of collaborative research at the University of Minnesota. MSI currently supports almost 500 active research groups by providing complete high-performance computing environments including systems, software, storage, support, and services. MSI resources have helped these researchers to be awarded $103.9 million in external funding in the past year. With the new HP supercomputer, MSI will be well poised to expand its established role of serving engineering and the physical and life sciences, and to provide services to many disciplines not traditionally served by MSI.
"Today, high-demand computation is absolutely central to a wide array of important research areas that are vital to putting the University of Minnesota in a leadership position," said Tom Jones, interim director of MSI. "This new computing system is a big step above what most other universities can call on, so our faculty and students are really excited by the big boost in computational resources they will have to drive the frontiers of knowledge."
"To maximize the effectiveness of their new supercomputer, MSI needed high system performance combined with ease of deployment and energy efficiency," said Steve Cumings, director of marketing, scalable computing and infrastructure at HP. "MSI's choice of HP ProLiant BL280c blade servers for their new system shows its value in a complex HPC environment, enabling MSI to expand their support and speed of active research, ultimately driving innovation."
TOP500 Rankings
The TOP500 ranking of supercomputers is released twice a year by researchers at the University of Tennessee, University of Mannheim, Germany, and at NERSC Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The list ranks supercomputers worldwide based on the Linpack N*N Benchmark, a yardstick of performance that is a reflection of processor speed and scalability.
About MSI
The University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute for Advanced Computational Research (MSI) is celebrating its 25th anniversary as an interdisciplinary research program spanning across all colleges of the University of Minnesota. MSI has established itself as a vital resource to the University of Minnesota by facilitating groundbreaking research, attracting top faculty and students, and enhancing researchers' competitive advantage in the search for external funding. For more information, visit www.msi.umn.edu.
MSI at SC09
Visit MSI in booth 155 at the SC09 supercomputing conference in Portland, Oregon, today through Nov. 20 for demonstrations showcasing research at the University of Minnesota. More information about MSI at SC09 is available at https://www.msi.umn.edu/events/sc09/.
-----
Source: University of Minnesota
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...
The Xeon Phi coprocessor might be the new kid on the high performance block, but out of all first-rate kickers of the Intel tires, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) got the first real jab with its new top ten Stampede system.We talk with the center's Karl Schultz about the challenges of programming for Phi--but more specifically, the optimization...
Read more...
Although Horst Simon was named Deputy Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he maintains his strong ties to the scientific computing community as an editor of the TOP500 list and as an invited speaker at conferences.
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...
May 10, 2013 |
Program provides cash awards up to $10,000 for the best open-source end-user applications deployed on 100G network.
Read more...
May 09, 2013 |
The Japanese government has revealed its plans to best its previous K Computer efforts with what they hope will be the first exascale system...
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.