News
NCSA To Build New Supercomputer
- By Joab Jackson
- September 09, 2008
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's National Center for Supercomputing
Applications (
NCSA)
has embarked on building a supercomputer that, once operational, will be capable
of executing 62.3 trillion floating-point operations per second (teraflops),
according to the center.
NCSA officials say the system, to be called Lincoln, will be operational by
next month. It will consist of 192 Dell PowerEdge servers, each one running
two quad-core Intel 2.33 GHz processors. Each server will also have 16G of memory.
For additional computational power, the system will use 96 Nvidia Tesla S1070
accelerator cards. Each card is essentially a graphics processing unit repurposed
for floating-point computational duties and offers an additional 500 gigaflops
of power, along with 16G of memory.
"Achieving performance at the petascale and exascale and beyond may well
depend on a heterogeneous mix of processors," said NCSA Director Thom
Dunning, in a written statement. "The use of novel architectures for scientific
computing is part of ongoing work at NCSA."
Technicians will network Lincoln with another NCSA supercomputer, Abe, which
boasts a top speed of 89 teraflops. Together the two supercomputers will allow
single applications to use up to 152 teraflops. The combined power of those
computers would put them in eighth place among the most powerful computers in
the world, as identified on the Top500's most recent list
of the fastest supercomputers.
Lincoln will be used for weather modeling and to help build programming tools
for researchers to make better use of multicore environments.
"There is a whole new constellation of parallel processing architectures
now entering the mainstream," said Wen-mei Hwu, a University of Illinois
professor who is leading a project to develop application algorithms, programming
tools and software for computational accelerators. "It is crucial that
we begin making use of them to drive scientific discovery and that we prepare
the next generation of researchers to harness them."
About the Author
Joab Jackson is the chief technology editor of Government Computing News (GCN.com).