GOVERNMENT

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin today announced a significant upgrade to its top-ranked terascale cluster, Lonestar. The upgrade, which will occur in two phases, will benefit researchers who rely on this powerful system to further research innovation in the areas of computational science, engineering and technology. Lonestar is the most powerful academic supercomputing system in the state of Texas and serves as a key resource in the National Science Foundation TeraGrid initiative, the world's largest, most comprehensive distributed cyberinfrastructure for open scientific research. Cyberinfrastructure includes supercomputers, data management systems, high capacity networks, digitally-enabled observatories and scientific instruments, and an interoperable suite of software and middleware services and tools for computation, visualization, and collaboration. All of the necessary components are now on site at TACC to complete the first phase of the upgrade which includes replacing compute nodes with the latest blade technology from Dell and interconnecting them with an InfiniBand network fabric from Topspin Communications. “This upgrade will increase the performance of scientific codes, and enable researchers to run larger applications that will scale better using the new InfiniBand interconnect,” said TACC Director Dr. Jay Boisseau. “But, most importantly, the migration to Dell blade technology will enable us to easily upgrade the capabilities as Intel produces faster, more capable processors. This transition will benefit users now and in the future when we upgrade the blades.” All compute nodes on Lonestar will be replaced with 450 Dell PowerEdge™ 1855 Blade Servers. The system will provide a theoretical peak performance of nearly six teraflops (one teraflop is equal to one trillion floating point math calculations per second). The improved architecture of the latest Intel Xeon processors and the Dell blades, combined with the high-speed InfiniBand interconnect, will result in improved performance and scalability of applications that run on Lonestar. TACC will partner with cluster experts from Dell and Topspin to implement this upgrade, which is scheduled to be complete and the system achieving full production status in June 2006. This upgrade will not only provide more computing capability, but position Lonestar for easier, more cost-effective upgrades in the future. By September 2006, all blades will be replaced with new blades containing state-of-the-art, dual-core Intel Xeon processors, and additional memory and nodes will be integrated via additional InfiniBand fabric. The resulting cluster will be at least 900 nodes and offer much greater performance and memory capability to enhance research capabilities in Texas and the United States. Since January 2004, computational scientists at The University of Texas at Austin and universities nationwide have successfully used Lonestar as a resource for research in disciplines including astronomy, genomics and proteomics, engineering, fluid dynamics, geosciences, materials science, molecular biology, physics, and nanotechnology: “My group is one of the heaviest users of supercomputer resources at UT Austin,” said Dr. Thomas Hughes, Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, College of Engineering. “We perform analyses of high Reynolds number turbulent flows about commercial and military airplanes, very large structural dynamics simulations of naval ship structures, and fluid-structure simulations of patient-specific models of the cardiovascular system used in surgical treatment planning. The upgrade plans TACC has for Lonestar will enable us to perform simulations of much greater fidelity and accuracy in much shortened turnaround times, and will represent a dramatic improvement in our ability to perform cutting-edge research on some of the most important problems facing the nation." "Using TACC’s Lonestar cluster, I’m studying the formation of the first stars and galaxies in the universe – one of the hottest fields in modern cosmology, pushing forward the frontier of our knowledge to a cosmic time that has until now been inaccessible to us,” said Dr. Volker Bromm, Department of Astronomy, College of Natural Sciences. “To make progress, and to succeed in a competitive global environment, I need access to state-of-the-art supercomputers, and TACC will continue its leadership in providing such cutting-edge infrastructure with this latest update to Lonestar." Dr. Charles Jackson, a scientist at the Jackson School of Geosciences, is an enthusiastic user of Lonestar in the area of climate sciences. “In quantifying the sources of uncertainty in climate model predictions, Lonestar represents a new frontier for university-based scientists to tackle challenging questions that would ordinarily only be considered in national labs such as the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), an NSF sponsored facility dedicated to developing and testing climate models,” said Jackson. “The workload involved in running a climate model may be distributed among many computers, but this is only practical and efficient if communications among these computers are tightly coupled, so the InfiniBand interconnect is a key technology that allows Lonestar to be useful for climate simulation. The large number of computational nodes has also been a key part in my ability to run the dozens of simultaneous experiments so that the knowledge we’re gaining can be obtained at a pace that is relevant to climate model development.”