ACADEMIA

CHAMPAIGN, IL -- The first large Itanium™-based Linux cluster for the national science community is now up and running at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The cluster consists of 160 dual-processor IBM IntelliStation Z Pro workstations and has a peak performance of 1 teraflop—or 1 trillion calculations per second. The cluster, named Titan, joins Platinum, NCSA's Pentium III Linux cluster, which was installed in March. Platinum also has a peak performance of 1 teraflop and was ranked the fastest Linux cluster in the world in the June top 500 supercomputers list (http://www.Top500.org/). Titan was delivered in July and is currently undergoing test runs. It is expected to enter freindly user mode by October 1 and will be offered to the research community as a production high-performance computing resource by Platinum entered production mode on July 23. A variety of scientific codes have already been tested on Itanium systems and are expected to be running on Titan within the next few weeks. These include a code used by the MILC (for MIMD Lattice Computation) collaboration to study quantum chromodynamics, Piecewise Parabolic Method (PPM), a code used to study turbulent flow, and NAMD, a molecular dynamics code designed for high-performance simulations of large biomolecular systems. Titan and Platinum are NCSA's first large-scale Linux cluster systems, but they definitely will not be the last. Over the next 18 months, NCSA plans to install another six teraflops of Linux cluster computing power. The new machines, to be based on Intel's second-generation Itanium chip, will be linked with existing teraflop machines to form an 8-teraflop cluster—the bulk of the computing power of the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid program. The TeraGrid will include the fastest unclassified supercomputers, a wealth of scientific applications and visualization environments, and toolkits for grid computing linked through the world's fastest network into an integrated information infrastructure. In August the NSF awarded funds to build and deploy the TeraGrid to NCSA and three partners: the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California at San Diego, Argonne National Laboratory (Argonne), and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). NCSA's Linux clusters will link with clusters at the other TeraGrid sites to form the 13.6 teraflop TeraGrid systems—the largest, fastest computer system ever deployed for open scientific research. Time lapse video of the installation of Titan: http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/MEDIA/vidlib/. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is the leading-edge site for the National Computational Science Alliance. NCSA is a leader in the development and deployment of cutting-edge high-performance computing, networking, and information technologies. The National Science Foundation, the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, industrial partners, and other federal agencies fund NCSA. The National Computational Science Alliance is a partnership to prototype an advanced computational infrastructure for the 21st century and includes more than 50 academic, government and industry research partners from across the United States. The Alliance is one of two partnerships funded by the National Science Foundation's Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program, and receives cost-sharing at partner institutions. NSF also supports the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), led by the San Diego Supercomputer Center.