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May 25, 2007
Minnesota Supercomputing Institute Gets New SGI Cluster
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SUNNYVALE, Calif., May 23 -- On any given day, hundreds of researchers may vie for access to the computing systems housed at the University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute for Digital Simulation and Advanced Computation. Even with some 2,000 processors at its disposal, the institute has sometimes struggled to keep up with growing demand.
Now, a massive new cluster solution from SGI will help ensure that current and emerging generations of processor-hungry applications won't slow down Minnesota scientists and engineers.
The 2,048-core SGI Altix XE 1300 cluster, expected to be installed this month, will transform the familiar submit-and-wait research experience into a vastly more interactive and productive one. By distributing complex applications across hundreds or thousands of the Altix XE cluster's processors, researchers will be able to complete calculations faster, run more iterations of a problem in less time, and refine their conclusions more quickly and effectively than ever before.
"This is an exciting and important acquisition for the Minnesota scientific community," said H. Birali Runesha, director, scientific computing and applications at the institute. "With the Altix XE cluster, we can push the capability of applications that once were running on a small number of cores. Now it will be easier to scale jobs and achieve faster turn-around times. In fact, it might become routine to see applications scaled across 1,000 cores or more."
For some researchers, the new cluster will revolutionize their productivity. "This new system, with its dramatically faster job turn-arounds, will enable studies that we just can't pursue today," added Runesha.
Outfitted with more than 4 terabytes of memory across 256 compute nodes, Minnesota's new Altix XE cluster will drive research in physical, biological, medical, mathematical and computing sciences, in addition to engineering studies and academic-industry collaboration.
For example, increasingly complex computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and astrophysics applications will now be able to leverage so many processors that engineers can interact with simulations on the university's 8-foot-by-6-foot PowerWall from the Laboratory for Computational Science and Engineering. With the Altix XE cluster bearing the computational workload and feeding results to the PowerWall's visualization system, researchers can, for instance, adjust various parameters and assumptions as they employ a grid of more than 6 billion cells to simulate entrainment of unburned hydrogen fuel into the convection zone above the helium burning shell in a dying giant star.
This interactivity brings a new dimension to research, enabling scientists to experience breakthroughs at the speed of thought instead of waiting through multiple iterations of generating new scenarios, running batch simulations and visualizing their results.
"A cluster this extensive will help Minnesota researchers pursue the kind of cutting-edge science required to write strong grant proposals for the National Science Foundation and other important sources of funding," added Runesha. "No longer will these researchers be limited by their resources."
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