ACADEMIA

The Texas Advanced Computer Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin has announced that it will add a powerful new IBM supercomputer, named "Champion," to its recently expanded machine room for research into a diverse range of scientific disciplines from biomedicine to climatology. Champion was named in honor of The University of Texas at Austin's Rose Bowl victory in addition to victories by several other Texas champions over the past year including the UT baseball team, the San Antonio Spurs and Lance Armstrong. The IBM eServer p5-575 system, expected to be the most powerful POWER5 processor-based academic supercomputer in Texas, will have a theoretical peak performance of 730 billion calculations per second. Champion will be available to the university's community of scientists and researchers in March 2006. "TACC was the first university in the country to deploy a POWER4-based system for open research in high performance computing," said TACC Director Dr. Jay Boisseau. "Compared to the POWER4 system, the 96-microprocessor POWER5-based p5 575 system offers greater performance per processor, greater application performance, and greater scalability when using multiple processors, while providing the next generation of POWER architecture to UT Austin and the national research community. Applications should see about 50 percent improved performance when running on the same number of processors. And we hope to grow the overall system substantially in 2006." "IBM's culture of innovation, collaboration and open standards is delivering breakthrough technologies that enable our customers like TACC to greatly improve their own efforts to innovate," said Tony Befi, IBM's Texas senior state executive. "Our supercomputing leadership is driven in large part by Austin-based development with technologies such as the p5 575, a high-density system at the core of supercomputing solutions powering work in areas such as genomic research, automotive crash-testing, petroleum exploration, and oceanographic, atmospheric and energy studies." Champion will serve several important local research projects. The university's Center for Space Research (CSR) will continue to work closely with TACC in a number of areas aligned with exploiting satellite derived measurements of the earth in studying a number of earth science and earth application areas. TACC's data handling and computational capability have provided a major underpinning for CSR's varied research programs. "The implementation of the new IBM POWER5-based system is a very important advance and will be of significant benefit to the range of CSR and TACC collaborations," said Dr. Byron Tapley, professor of aerospace engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. "The advance is of particular importance to the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission." GRACE is the first mission in NASA's Earth System Science Pathfinder project, which uses satellite-born instrumentation to aid research on global climate change. GRACE's first static gravity field map, calculated at TACC, is two orders of magnitude more accurate than any previous maps. Because of this unprecedented accuracy, GRACE is able to observe, for the first time, changes in the Earth's large-scale ocean currents, polar ice masses, and the masses of water in large river basins and underground aquifers. "We look forward to the enhanced performance associated with the IBM POWER5-based system as a fundamental requirement in satisfying the GRACE computational requirements," Tapley said. "With NASA's mission extension, the data collected will increase by 60 percent and the modeled size associated with fully exploiting the micron level measurements will increase the computational demand by almost an order of magnitude." The Institute for Computational Engineering and Science (ICES) will access the new supercomputer for a variety of ongoing projects. "This is a very important acquisition that will be of immense value to researchers at ICES and will be extensively used in a variety of ongoing projects in areas of computational science and engineering ranging from biomedicine to aerodynamics and electromagnetics," said Tinsley Oden, director of ICES, and long-time user of TACC's resources and services. TACC also will deploy Grid-based technologies on Champion, and integrate it into TACC and university campus Grid activities. A portion of the system's computing cycles will be used to support national projects such as GridChem. The latest Grid software tools will be installed and supported, including packages from the National Science Foundation Middleware Initiative, such as Globus, along with TACC-developed Grid tools, such as GridShell.