INDUSTRY

SAN DIEGO, CA -- RackSaver, a leading provider of high-density individual rack-mounted computer servers and supercomputer clusters, today announced that the University of Delaware's Bartol Research Institute has completed installation and benchmarking of its second RackSaver supercluster system. The high performance, highly scalable system, known as SAMSON-2, is also the first supercluster system in the United States to use the new WulfKit3 three-dimensional interconnect, an innovative high-performance interconnect developed by partner Dolphin Interconnect Solutions. SAMSON-2 joins the first SAMSON supercluster system, which RackSaver installed at Bartol in Fall 2000 and at the time was the largest custom supercomputer to use the AMD Athlon(TM) processor. "We're very pleased to have the opportunity to continue our relationship with UD's Bartol Research Institute and excited to be able to assist them in the important computational physics work they're undertaking," said David Driggers, RackSaver CEO. "I think this proves yet again that RackSaver's reputation is well deserved for fierce loyalty to our customers and their needs and delivering quality, reliable, state-of-the-art computing systems at a fair price." SAMSON-2, already delivering an impressive 230 Gigaflops on the Linpack benchmark, consists of 64 dual-processor 1U rack-mounted nodes with a total of 128 AMD 1.4GHz Athlon(TM) processors. Dolphin's WulfKit3 system interconnects the nodes in a 4x4x4 three-dimensional torus distributed switch topology. According to Professor Bill Matthaeus, principal investigator at Bartol, SAMSON-2 will provide state-of-the-art supercomputing for the demanding computational physics research at the University. Bartol leads a University of Delaware consortium that includes the departments of physics and astronomy, mechanical engineering, and computer and information sciences. Research projects to be supported by the supercluster include studies of space physics, cosmic rays, solar physics, plasma physics, turbulence and molecular physics. "We are using cluster supercomputers to develop models that will enable us to understand various important properties of the sun, the near earth space environment as well as more distant phenomena in the galaxy and elsewhere in the universe," Matthaeus said. An example is the ongoing effort to understand how the surface of the sun and the lower atmosphere of the sun become so hot. It is the temperature and other properties of the lower corona that establish the baseline conditions for the gaseous, magnetic field and cosmic ray environment of the entire solar system. This is important as basic science and also because of its implications for "space weather" that affect satellites, communications and power grids on the Earth's surface. SAMSON-2 is funded by a National Science Foundation Major Research Infrastructure grant.