HPCwire: NSF Awards $7M to TACC for Remote Visualization and Data Analysis

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September 28, 2009

NSF Awards $7M to TACC for Remote Visualization and Data Analysis

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AUSTIN, Texas, Sept. 28 -- The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a $7 million grant to the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin for a three-year project that will provide a new compute resource and the largest, most comprehensive suite of visualization and data analysis (VDA) services to the open science community.

The new compute resource, "Longhorn," will provide unprecedented VDA capabilities and will enable the national and international science communities to interactively visualize and analyze datasets of near petabyte scale (a quadrillion bytes or 1,000 terabytes) for scientists to explore, gain insight and develop new knowledge.

According to Kelly Gaither, principal investigator and director of data & information analysis at TACC, the sudden onset of the widespread adoption of high performance computing (HPC) enabled by commodity clusters, and the scaling of systems to hundreds of teraflops and beyond made it urgent to ensure that this data deluge did not cause a bottleneck for visualization of very large datasets.

"The capabilities of VDA resources have not kept pace with the explosive rate of data production leading to a critical juncture in computational science," Gaither says. "Interactive visualization, data analysis and timely data assimilation are necessary for exploring important and challenging problems throughout science, engineering, medicine, national security and safety, to name a few important areas."

Alan Blatecky, acting deputy director of NSF's Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI), said the importance of providing significant funding for this effort at this point in time is immeasurable.

"Science is being driven and defined by data," he said, "and our ability to manage, manipulate, mine and visualize the results is fundamental to the discovery process."

"These eXtremeDigital program awards meet the end-to-end needs of the user science community spot on," said Barry Schneider, OCI program director. "They will enable visualizing the results from complex numerical simulations and experiments in real time."

Longhorn System Capabilities

Total Peak Performance (CPUs): 20.7 teraflops.
Total Peak Performance (GPUs): 500 teraflops single precision floating point operations.
Total Peak Rendering Performance: 154 billion triangles/sec.
Total Memory: 13.5 terabytes.
Total Disk: 210 terabyte global file system.

System Components and Technologies

256 Dell R610 and R710 servers each with two Intel Xeon 5500 processors.
512 CPUs with 2,048 Intel ?Nehalem? (2.53GHz) quad-core processors.
128 NVIDIA Quadroplex 2200 S4 units each with four Quadro FX 5800 GPUs with 122,880 CUDA processor cores; 2,048 gigabytes (two terabytes) of distributed graphics RAM.

Visualization and Data Analysis Services

A comprehensive collection of open source and commercial end-user VDA tools.
Expert visualization support, including advanced interactive user support and training from a team comprising leading visualization researchers.
A framework for rapidly integrating new visualization technologies from leading research teams to increase user capabilities throughout the project.

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