HPCwire: IU's Big Red supercomputer, Data Capacitor shine at ISC

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

HPCwire >> Off the Wire

June 29, 2007

IU's Big Red supercomputer, Data Capacitor shine at ISC

BLOOMINGTON, Ind., June 27 -- Indiana University's "Big Red" supercomputer is again ranked among the world's fastest, and IU accomplishments in advanced cyberinfrastructure are attracting attention and acclaim at the International Supercomputer Conference being held this week in Dresden, Germany. "Big Red" placed 30th on the June 2007 list of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers unveiled today at the conference. Additionally, Indiana University's Data Capacitor team, with partners from Technische Universitaet Dresden, demonstrated impressive performance on a distributed transatlantic Lustre file system designed to move large amounts of scientific data quickly and easily.

Thanks to an upgrade this spring with the assistance of the Indiana Economic Development Corporation, Big Red moved up in rank, after placing 31st in the previous (fall 2006) list. The higher rankings of the TOP500 list change very rapidly; IU's ranking shows the strides that IU is making to provide researchers with the tools to accelerate innovation and discovery.

"Big Red is one of the most powerful supercomputers in existence and it is the fastest ever in the state of Indiana," said Brad Wheeler, Indiana University chief information officer and dean of information technology at IU Bloomington.

Since 1993, The TOP500 List has been compiled twice a year by a group of highly respected leaders in the supercomputing community and released at the world's two largest supercomputing conferences - the International Supercomputer Conference held each June in Germany, and the US Supercomputing Conference held each November in the U.S.

IU's Data Capacitor - a 535 Terabyte storage system - is also featured in the week's hardware news at the International Supercomputing Conference. Using Wide Area Network access to the Lustre file system and the Data Capacitor over GEANT2 and Internet2 advanced research networks, a team from IU and the Technische Universitaet Dresden achieved nearly 100 Megabytes/sec data transfer over a single 1 Gigabit link across the Atlantic Ocean. The team has plans to increase the capabilities of long-distance data access via Lustre in the near future. The ability to transparently access data across long distances is critical to enabling new scientific advances, as the amount of research data "born digital" continues to skyrocket. IU is also working within the U.S. to enable use of the Data Capacitor across long distances, within the NSF-funded TeraGrid.

Supporting the ability to manage massive amounts of data and large-scale computational analysis is a critical aspect of Indiana University's strategy for supporting innovation. IU is putting new focus on advanced computation as a tool for economic innovation in Indiana.

Craig Stewart, associate dean for research technologies and chief operating officer of Pervasive Technology Labs at Indiana University, said, "Big Red has enabled scientific innovations at IU and, via the TeraGrid, throughout the nation. The key challenge for us in the months ahead will be to use Big Red to enable new business innovations within the State of Indiana, working with our colleagues from Purdue for the benefit of the economy of the state."

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant numbers. CNS-0521433. ACI-0338618l, OCI-0451237, OCI-0535258, and OCI-0504075. Collaboration with the Technische Universitaet Dresden has been supported by TU-D, Indiana University, and the Fulbright Senior Scholar's program. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF), Lilly Endowment, Inc., or any other funding agency.

University Information Technology Services (UITS) at Indiana University, with offices on the Bloomington and Indianapolis campuses, develops and maintains a modern information technology environment throughout the university in support of IU's vision for excellence in research, teaching, outreach and lifelong learning. UITS provides tools and services to support the academic and administrative work of the university, including supercomputers for data analysis and visualization. For more information, see http://uits.iu.edu/.

IU's Big Red supercomputer was funded in part via the Indiana METACyt Initiative, with support from the Lilly Endowment, Inc. and by Shared University Research grants from IBM, Inc. to Indiana University.

-----

Source: Indiana University

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

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

The Week in Review

The ACM Turing Award goes to the creator of the modern personal computer; and Voltaire announces a mid-range InfiniBand switch and new technology that accelerates distributed applications. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

Florida State Gives Virtual SMPs a Spin

The prospects for virtual SMP technology got another boost last month when Florida State University announced it had installed a new HPC system from 3Leaf Systems. The servers are being housed at the university's HPC facility and will be used across a range of scientific disciplines.
Read More...

HPC Powers Bobsled Team to Olympic Gold

For the first time in 62 years, the four-man Olympics bobsled team from the US captured the gold medal, setting a course world record in the process. The winning bobsled had some state-of-the-art engineering behind it, including CFD software from Exa Corporation. As it turned out, that software may have proved to be the margin of difference in the race.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

GP-GPUs: OpenCL Is Ready For The Heavy Lifting

Mar 11 | Linux Magazine | CUDA may be the rage, but OpenCL is a standard that has some features you may need. Read more...

Can Free Software Drive the Fourth Paradigm?

Mar 09 | Free Software Magazine | Data-driven computing will need open software. Read more...

Graphics Card Maker Turns to High-Performance Bioinformatics

Mar 09 | Bio-IT World | Tahoe Informatics founder eyes GPUs, CUDA software. Read more...

CFD: Light at the End of the Tunnel?

Mar 08 | Sporting Life | Formula One engineers differ on benefits of CFD. Read more...

AMD Tries to Draw Intel Into Chip Battle

Mar 08 | InfoWorld | AMD offers up 48-core server prize. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html