GOVERNMENT

Mississippi State's standing as a supercomputing leader has a new rank.

The latest list of Top500 Supercomputer Sites rates a system at the university as the 18th fastest at any U.S. academic location, as well as the 331st most powerful computer in the world.

"Mississippi State has been on 18 of the past 29 Top500 lists dating back to June 1996," Trey Breckenridge, office administrator for the university's High Performance Computing Collaboratory, said Wednesday.

"There are four supercomputers at Southeastern Conference schools on the most recent list, but our system is the fastest SEC system that is not a National Science Foundation nationally accessible resource," he said.

Named "Talon," the MSU supercomputer features an IBM iDataPlex cluster with 3,072 processor cores, six-core Intel Xeon processors, and more than six terabytes of RAM.

When combined with MSU's system, supercomputers at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Navy/Department of Defense Supercomputing Resource centers in Vicksburg and the NASA John C. Stennis Space Center in Bay St. Louis currently propel Mississippi to No. 8 in the total U.S. supercomputing power rankings.

"Talon" also uses a high-speed quad data rate InfiniBand network provided by Voltaire Inc., and has a peak performance of more than 34 trillion calculations per second.

Breckenridge said the unit is five times faster than the university's previous fastest system, but consumes less than half the electricity.

Located at the High Performance Computing Collaboratory--HPC2, for short--Building in the Thad Cochran Research, Technology and Economic Development Park, the supercomputer supports the land-grant institution's centers for Advanced Vehicular Systems and Computational Sciences, along with the Geosystems Research Institute and Northern Gulf Institute.

"The supercomputing power we have in Mississippi is becoming more important as the state and region develop an economy where businesses built on technology thrive," Breckenridge said. "The economic impact that Talon and facilities like the HPC2 make is significant now and will be much more so in the years to come."

The complete Top 500 Supercomputer Site list may be viewed at www.top500.org.

For more about MSU's HPC2, visit www.hpc.msstate.edu.

For more information about Mississippi State University, see http://www.msstate.edu/.