CLOUD

Powerful New Clustered System from IBM Is World's Largest Diskless "InfiniBand" Supercomputer - IBM today announced that Mississippi State University (MSU) has installed the world's largest diskless InfiniBand supercomputer. The new powerful clustered system from IBM is expected to be the 30th most powerful computer in the world. The new supercomputer, dubbed “Maverick,” will be used by researchers at the University's cutting edge Engineering Research Center (ERC), an institute for computational science and engineering that helps businesses and researchers tackle tough computational questions. Maverick will use the InfiniBand technology to speed communications between 192 servers, increasing communications of the system by 10 times over traditional methods. "IBM worked closely with MSU to develop a powerful, state of the art clustering supercomputing solution that would meet their needs," said Dave Turek, vice president of Deep Computing, IBM. "The reliability and ease of management of the IBM cluster solution combined with the throughput capability of InfiniBand yielded a significant increase in performance for the breakthrough MSUcluster." Research conducted at the MSU Engineering Research Center has the potential to benefit governments, businesses and consumers. Maverick will enable automotive research projects that computationally test the “crash-worthiness” of new automobiles with the goal of making cars safer. Such research can also reduce the time required to complete a test, potentially saving companies tens of thousands of dollars. Other Maverick Research projects will include a “virtual wind tunnel” that tests the aerodynamics of automobiles, aircraft, and ships to increase performance and aid fuel efficiency. The Engineering Research Center is also conducting research aimed at understanding and predicting the formation of ice on aircraft wings in order to make air travel safer. "The vast amount of computation involved in our studies required a new type of technology that would allow us to maximize our computing resources," said David Marcum, Director of the ERC SimCenter. "The combination of IBM eServers and new InfiniBand technology gave us a 400 percent increase in processing power over our current cluster." The Engineering Research Center cluster is comprised of 192 dual Xeon processor IBM eServer xSeries 335 servers and connected by Voltaire's InfiniBand solution to deliver a peak performance of 2.3 TFlops. Voltaire is a leading provider of InfiniBand solutions that improves the performance and efficiency of server clusters for HPC applications.