ACADEMIA

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is installing a new cyber-resource for the nation’s scientists and engineers, ­a cluster of 450 Dell PowerEdge 1855 blade servers. The cluster, named Lincoln, will serve strategic campus and state initiatives and will be used by the center’s private sector partners. Lincoln’s peak performance will approach 6 teraflops (6 trillion calculations per second), bringing NCSA’s total compute power to nearly 50 teraflops. “The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has identified several major new initiatives this past year, including initiatives in sustainable energy and the environment, integrated sciences for health, and informatics. All of these initiatives need advanced computing capabilities,” said NCSA Director Thom Dunning. “Lincoln will provide the resources needed to move these initiatives forward.” Lincoln follows in the path of two other Dell clusters that NCSA offers to the national research community­Tungsten and T2. Tungsten, which is supported by the National Science Foundation and is allocated through NSF’s peer reviewed process, is an extremely popular resource, attracting requests for allocations that far exceed the amount of time available on the system. T2 has been extensively used by the center’s private sector partners since it was added to the machine room late in 2004. “NCSA’s Private Sector Program continues to grow and now includes collaborations with Illinois-based, Boeing, Caterpillar, Deere & Co., and Motorola Labs, among other major enterprises,” said Mark Nolan, director of NCSA’s Private Sector Program. “Acquiring this system will enable us to offer a powerful resource to these partners.” Funding for Lincoln was provided by the University of Illinois. NCSA plans to upgrade Lincoln in the coming months.