ENGINEERING

Preconfigured cluster designed to simplify purchase, installation: The Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) and Dell announced today an agreement to expand SURAgrid, a high-performance grid computing infrastructure for the research and education community throughout the Southeastern U.S. Under the three-year agreement, more than 60 SURAgrid member universities will be able to purchase a Dell high performance computing cluster (HPCC) specially configured for use on the SURAgrid. Dell and SURA worked together to configure the Linux-based clusters running on Dell PowerEdge servers. The clusters will be built at Dell’s HPCC Merge Center, where the servers will be racked, cabled, shrink-wrapped and shipped to the customer, ready for installation, simplifying the process of getting them up and running. The Dell – SURA collaboration will increase the computational resources available to universities in the Southeastern U.S. by integrating Dell products and technologies into the pool of high-performance computing systems that make up SURAgrid. The program is designed to help establish new “grid communities,” or teams of researchers who will collaborate to increase research and education across the region. “This agreement with Dell helps advance the work of SURAgrid by providing SURAgrid participants with access to the latest high-performance computing technology,” said Jerry P. Draayer, president and CEO of SURA. “With this agreement, the capability and capacity of SURAgrid will grow significantly, improving the infrastructure of the SURA region and providing new tools for regional scientific discovery.” “High performance computing is opening new frontiers in research on university campuses around the world,” said John Mullen, Dell vice president of higher education. “This agreement will simplify information technology for researchers by helping SURA members more easily acquire, install and maintain high performance clusters, while giving more researchers access to computing power.” SURAgrid harnesses the power of heterogeneous computing systems at participating colleges and universities with the goal of creating a single, virtualized system for researchers to run advanced scientific applications that require massive computational capabilities. The SURAgrid community relies on grid middleware from Globus.org that allows disparate systems to work together, and is supported by local, regional and national high-speed network services that have been deployed throughout the region over the past several years. SURAgrid is unique among current grid initiatives in its persistent emphasis on the diversity of available resources and also the user community that will benefit from access to them.