GOVERNMENT

CHAMPAIGN, IL -- The first Itanium Linux cluster to be deployed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois is also the world's fastest Itanium cluster, according to latest edition of the Top 500 Supercomputers list. Titan, NCSA's 320-processor IBM IntelliStation cluster that runs on Intel's 64-bit Itanium architecture, ranked 34th on the list that was released Nov. 9, showing peak performance of 1.024 teraflops (trillions of calculations per second) and sustained performance of 677.9 gigaflops (billions of calculations per second). The cluster was the second most powerful Linux cluster on the list, ranking just behind Sandia National Laboratory's Cplant/Ross cluster, a self-made 1,369-processor machine that ranked 29th overall on the list. "This list shows the power of even a relatively small Itanium cluster," said Dan Reed, director of NCSA and the National Computational Science Alliance, and chief architect of the NSF TeraGrid project. "In the next two years, Titan and Platinum, our Pentium III cluster, will be incorporated into a much larger, second generation Itanium cluster that will be the bulk of the computing power of the TeraGrid. Titan is only the start -- we are on our way to creating the most powerful systems ever deployed for open scientific research." The TeraGrid is a $53 million effort funded by the National Science Foundation to build the world's largest, fastest, most comprehensive, distributed infrastructure for open scientific research. When completed the TeraGrid computing system will include 13.6 teraflops of Linux cluster computing power distributed at the four TeraGrid sites: NCSA in Champaign, IL; the San Diego Supercomputer Center in San Diego; Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, IL; and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Titan was installed at NCSA last July and August and was put through a series of operational tests in September and October. It will be available for use by the academic research community before the end of the year. Platinum, NCSA's Pentium III Linux cluster, ranked 40th on the latest Top 500 list, with a peak performance of just over 1 teraflops and sustained performance of 594 gigaflops. The Top 500 list is compiled twice a year by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany; Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of the U.S. Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, Berkeley, CA.; and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. To view the complete list, see http://www.top500.org/. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a leader in developing and deploying cutting-edge high-performance computing, networking, and information technologies. NCSA is a partner in the TeraGrid project, a National Science Foundation initiative to build and deploy the world's largest, fastest, most comprehensive, distributed infrastructure for open scientific research. NCSA also leads the National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance), a partnership to prototype an advanced computational infrastructure for the 21st century that includes more than 50 academic, government, and industry research partners. The NSF Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program funds the Alliance. In addition to the NSF, NCSA receives support from the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, private sector partners, and other federal agencies. For more information, see http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/