ACADEMIA
NCSA adds two clusters, 110 teraflops of computing power
Abe to serve research, T3 to support industry: The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will give a powerful boost to researchers in academia and industry with the addition of two new supercomputing clusters. The two systems, Abe and T3, will provide 110 teraflops (trillions of calculations per second) of computing power, more than doubling NCSA's total capacity to more than 146 teraflops. 
Abe, named in honor of 16th president Abraham Lincoln, has a peak performance of more than 88 trillion calculations per second (88.3 teraflops). The system was purchased with funds from the state of Illinois and will be shared by researchers at the University's new Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies, headed by NCSA Director Thom Dunning, and by the national science and engineering communities served by the National Science Foundation. Continuing a model that has proven very popular with scientists using NCSA's Tungsten cluster, the center will allow researchers to reserve blocks of Abe (at a minimum of 1,000 cores) for days or even weeks, allowing them to accelerate their research. Abe's users will even be able to reserve access to all 1,200 nodes (9,600 cores) of the cluster for the most demanding simulations. Abe is a Dell blade system with 1,200 PowerEdge 1955 dual-socket, quad-core Intel Xeon 2.3 GHz processors, and InfiniBand and GigE connections. Each processor has 4 gigabytes of memory, providing a system total of 9.6 terabytes. The InfiniBand interconnect provides high-speed communication capability, enabling users to run tightly coupled applications that achieve high levels of scaling. The GigE control network allows for system diagnostic and machine-management functions without interrupting application communications. Abe will offer 170 terabytes of storage in a Lustre file system, providing 7.5 GB/s peak I/O performance. T3 is the successor to T2, a Dell cluster that has been used extensively by NCSA's industrial partners since it came online late in 2004. T3 is a Dell blade system with 1,040 dual-core 2.66 GHz Intel processors, an InfiniBand interconnect, 4.1 terabytes of total memory, and a 20 terabyte Lustre filesystem. The peak performance of T3 is 22.1 teraflops. "NCSA has been working closely with industry for many years, enabling leading American companies to apply advanced computing technologies to help solve their most urgent problems," said NCSA Director Thom Dunning. "Our Private Sector Program continues to grow, and the addition to T3 enables us to continue offering our partners a powerful, cutting-edge resource." T3 is slated to be available for use by NCSA's industrial partners in mid-March; Abe will enter production later this spring. The two new systems will join Tungsten (16.8 teraflops), Mercury (10.6 teraflops), Cobalt (6.6 teraflops), and Copper (2 teraflops).
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