July 15 — TACC is keeping the Lonestar supercomputer legacy alive and well. The center has announced the deployment of Lonestar5 in conjunction with Cray Inc. and Intel Inc., the second petaflop system deployed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin’s J.J. Pickle Research Campus.

As with its predecessor, Lonestar5 is funded through a statewide effort, including UT System, Texas Tech, Texas A&M, and the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences and the Center for Space Research at The University of Texas at Austin.

“Lonestar5 will be far more powerful than its predecessor,” said Bill Barth, TACC’s director of High Performance Computing. “With 50 percent more cores than Lonestar4 and about four times the performance, we will keep this capability going. Our systems are incredibly productive, and we expect demand for Lonestar5 to be very high. As a leading national computing resource center, we are seeing more demand than we can possibly meet.”

Academic researchers in Austin and across Texas will have increased potential for knowledge discovery in all disciplines with Lonestar5, especially as TACC continues to support the growth of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) datasets. In addition, Lonestar5 will continue to be instrumental in bringing new members to the center’s industrial affiliates program.

The new Cray XC40 supercomputer, which contains more than 30,000 Intel® Xeon® processing cores from the E5-2600 v3 product family, will provide a peak performance of 1.25 petaflops. The system will continue to serve its mainstay user communities with an emphasis on addressing a wide variety of research areas.

“We’re looking forward to renewing our relationship with Cray, one of the leading companies in the supercomputing sector,” Barth said. “We value having a diversity of high performance computing architectures and vendors — Lonestar5 is a nice complement to some of our other systems.”

“Both TACC and Cray share a common vision for how supercomputers can have profound impacts on our daily lives by powering scientific discoveries that change the world,” said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. “This belief in the power of supercomputing is what drives us to provide our customers with advanced, innovative technologies for taking on the most difficult challenges. We are very excited that TACC has added a Cray to the Lonestar program, and we look forward to giving their users a powerful tool for achieving scientific breakthroughs.”

“Intel is pleased to continue our commitment and support for academic research computing with the Texas Advanced Computing Center and the Lonestar supercomputer,” said Charlie Wuischpard, vice president of Data Center Group and general manager of Workstations and HPC at Intel.

“The new Lonestar5 machine will provide increased research capacity for academic researchers and scientists across the many domains of open science. With Intel’s leadership class technologies coupled with TACC’s leading user support services, Lonestar5 will impact new scientific discovery and improve time to result for academic researchers.”

Lonestar5 will continue to serve as the primary high performance computing resource in the UT Research Cyberinfrastructure (UTRC) initiative. Sponsored by The University of Texas System, UTRC provides a combination of advanced computational systems, a large data storage opportunity, and high bandwidth data access. UTRC enables researchers within all 15 UT System institutions to collaborate with each other and compete at the forefront of science and discovery.

“Lonestar5 will perhaps be the primary computing system for health researchers for the Dell Medical School in 2016,” Barth said. “We will add new users across the state through our ability to support private health data.”

“It is exciting to know that we will be able to continue working with user services organizations at Texas A&M University, Texas Tech University, and UT Systems institutions in bringing this resource to bear on research projects across the state,” said Chris Hempel, TACC’s director of User Services. “This partnership enables researchers across the state access to computing resources that complement local institutional resources and encourages state-wide collaborative activities.”

With 24 processing cores per compute node, Lonestar5 follows the trend of more cores per node that the industry sees in every generation of microprocessors. This continues to be a challenge for many applications as they attempt to take advantage of more cores and increased memory per node. Lonestar5 will also share a work file system with TACC’s Stampede, Maverick and Wrangler systems, all integrated to support simulation data, big data applications, and visualization data for users at TACC.

System Specifications

• 1252 compute nodes, each with two 12-core Intel Xeon processing cores for a total of 30,048 compute cores
• 2 large memory compute nodes, each with 1TB memory
• 8 large memory compute nodes, each with 512GB memory
• 1.2PB DataDirect Networks storage system
• Cray-developed Aries interconnect

—

Source: TACC