HPCwire: TACC's "Lonestar" Shines

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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.

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Source: Faith Singer-Villalobos; TACC

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