INDUSTRY

The Dresden University of Technology (TUD) has Invested $18 million into a high performance computing environment for data-intensive scientific computing and has selected technology from Linux Networx to supply the Linux cluster portion of the computing environment. Within the next twelve months, Linux Networx will deliver a computing resource with approximately 700 system boards and a more than 2,500 AMD processor cores, enabling the TUD to meet the increased capacity computing challenges for high performance and top flexibility. The Linux Networx cluster system will support hundreds of scientists working simultaneously on a variety of demanding HPC applications. A large number of scientific users ranging from physics, materials sciences and engineering to bioinformatics and nanotechnology will benefit from this new Linux Networx computing resource. The TUD project called “High-performance Computing/Storage Complex for data-intensive Computing“ does not only represent one of the largest HPC procurements within Europe in 2005, but also allows the TUD to differentiate itself among the other computing centres. The project’s visionary concept creates new possibilities of capability computing for single homogeneous applications, opens a new performance level for heterogeneous load profiles on the capacity computing side, and integrates both these components into a seamless, high-bandwidth storage infrastructure to quickly move large and very large data sets. Linux Networx is a partner of SGI, who will act as the general contractor and procure the capability component by installing an Altix shared memory system with 6 TB of main memory and more than 1,500 Intel-Itanium 2 processor cores. "We will receive a highly balanced and versatilely usable computing and storage complex built on excellent components, which will allow us to accept new and exciting challenges in the area of homogeneous as well as heterogeneous data-intensive scientific computing," said Prof. Wolfgang E. Nagel, Director of ZIH (Center for Information Services & HPC).