ACADEMIA
Georgia State Adds New IBM Supercomputer to Keep Pace With Demand
University Builds Computing Resources as More Scientists Look to Supercomputers for Answers: Georgia State University and IBM announced today that the university has purchased an IBM System Cluster 1350 supercomputer through a regional partnership program between IBM and the Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA). This purchase is the latest addition to the school's expanding inventory of supercomputing resources. 
Georgia State University and IBM announced today that the university has purchased an IBM System Cluster 1350 supercomputer through a regional partnership program between IBM and the Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA). This purchase is the latest addition to the school's expanding inventory of supercomputing resources. Georgia State is building a diverse and powerful supercomputing center to support a growing body of academic and scientific research. In September 2006 three researchers began working with a new IBM System p5 575 with Power5+ processors running AIX 5.3 -- acquired as part of the IBM-SURA regional partnership. Those three users became a dozen in January 2007 and now include more than 40 faculty from many disciplines as well as from other SURA sites such as Virginia Commonwealth University, Louisiana State University and University of Delaware. "We're experiencing increasing demand for supercomputer resources," said Art Vandenberg, director of the university's supercomputing center. "Our strategy is to build a center that supports a wide variety of disciplines. So, we're adding the Cluster 1350 to support research that requires commodity level, Linux computing." The new IBM System Cluster 1350 will help meet this increasing demand. As researchers gain access to more capacity and capability, they naturally are expanding their goals, driving demand. Researchers in chemistry, biology, molecular dynamics, computer science, climate modeling and political science will be among the new machine's first users. The Cluster 1350 will be added to Georgia State's high-end IBM System p5 575 supercomputer to offer scientists a range of in-house computing capabilities. The 320 Intel Xeon Quad-Core processors that make up Georgia State's new Cluster 1350 will also be shared by SURA -- a group of 60 schools that shares supercomputing resources via a grid setup known as SURAgrid. The university's Cluster 1350 configuration runs at approximately three teraflops, or three billion calculations per second. "Georgia State University has been a long term contributor to the SURAgrid initiative and we are extremely pleased that SURA has been able to assist Georgia State and other SURAgrid participants by providing access to specially discounted hardware and services through our partnership with IBM," said Gary Crane, SURA Director of IT Initiatives. Parasites & Politics
A partial list of the university's research projects that will benefit from the new IBM supercomputer includes:
Georgia State University and IBM announced today that the university has purchased an IBM System Cluster 1350 supercomputer through a regional partnership program between IBM and the Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA). This purchase is the latest addition to the school's expanding inventory of supercomputing resources. Georgia State is building a diverse and powerful supercomputing center to support a growing body of academic and scientific research. In September 2006 three researchers began working with a new IBM System p5 575 with Power5+ processors running AIX 5.3 -- acquired as part of the IBM-SURA regional partnership. Those three users became a dozen in January 2007 and now include more than 40 faculty from many disciplines as well as from other SURA sites such as Virginia Commonwealth University, Louisiana State University and University of Delaware. "We're experiencing increasing demand for supercomputer resources," said Art Vandenberg, director of the university's supercomputing center. "Our strategy is to build a center that supports a wide variety of disciplines. So, we're adding the Cluster 1350 to support research that requires commodity level, Linux computing." The new IBM System Cluster 1350 will help meet this increasing demand. As researchers gain access to more capacity and capability, they naturally are expanding their goals, driving demand. Researchers in chemistry, biology, molecular dynamics, computer science, climate modeling and political science will be among the new machine's first users. The Cluster 1350 will be added to Georgia State's high-end IBM System p5 575 supercomputer to offer scientists a range of in-house computing capabilities. The 320 Intel Xeon Quad-Core processors that make up Georgia State's new Cluster 1350 will also be shared by SURA -- a group of 60 schools that shares supercomputing resources via a grid setup known as SURAgrid. The university's Cluster 1350 configuration runs at approximately three teraflops, or three billion calculations per second. "Georgia State University has been a long term contributor to the SURAgrid initiative and we are extremely pleased that SURA has been able to assist Georgia State and other SURAgrid participants by providing access to specially discounted hardware and services through our partnership with IBM," said Gary Crane, SURA Director of IT Initiatives. Parasites & Politics
A partial list of the university's research projects that will benefit from the new IBM supercomputer includes: - Dr. Tarynn Witten, Virginia Commonwealth University, plans to create more complex and biologically realistic models to investigate Chagas' Disease. The long-term goal of this project is to apply novel mathematical and computational modeling technologies to develop new paradigms for understanding the infectious disease process. (Web site)
- Maryam Rahimian, PhD student in chemistry at Georgia State University, also plans to study parasitic diseases such as sleeping sickness, malaria and leishmania. The goal is to find new drugs with high efficiency and low cost. The IBM HPC Systems enable Rahimian to run more complex models which can provide valuable information on the influence of solvent and molecular motion in DNA complexes.
- Eric Hurst, PhD student in political science, intends to apply the university's additional compute power to one of the first political science studies to run on a supercomputer. Hurst intends to study the complete voting history of independent regulatory commissions, such as the SEC, to help determine how ideology and bureaucracy affect the nation's policies and politics.
The IBM System Cluster 1350 will be configured with additional IBM solutions including: BladeCenter H technology, HS21 XM Blade servers utilizing two Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors, 10G Ethernet backbone, IBM's xCAT and Loadleveler cluster management tools. It will also have access to existing Tivoli Storage Manager and 18 Terabytes of storage that Georgia State has acquired during the past year. This will allow researchers to easily share results from the IBM System p5 with the new IBM System Cluster 1350 -- and vice versa.
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