ACADEMIA

UPDATE -- Streamline Computing in the UK announced the delivery of the world's most efficient gigabit Linux supercomputing cluster to Nottingham University. The 1024 CPU 2.2GHz Opteron cluster was officially listed at position 109 in the latest Top500 list. An analysis of the list shows the Nottingham University Jupiter system to be the world's most efficient gigabit supercomputing cluster, even though it is built using low-cost 48 port stackable switches, based on 3Com's 3780 series. "We are very pleased to have placed our 8th system in the Top500 list since 2002," said Richard Groves, COO of Streamline Computing...We have been able to deliver a highly cost effective computing resource to Nottingham University that competes favourably with systems utilizing specialized technology and costing the customers a great deal more money." With a stunning 71.6% efficiency, the cluster demonstrates how commodity technology can be made to scale in a highly effective manner. "The result demonstrates Streamline's added-value in the marketplace, and confirms our investment in R&D as well as staff who really understand High Performance Computing," added Dr Groves. “The cluster is running a version of the SCore cluster environment that has been specially tuned to offer our customers outstanding performance and reliability. While it is recognized that the HPL benchmark is not always representative of real applications and workloads, Streamline have also undertaken a range of benchmarks on a number of academic codes that show between 20% and 1200% improvement on 32 processors compared with our competitors' clusters. We have been working on new technology that will widen this performance gap even further."