OIL & GAS

"Lonestar" High-performance Computing Cluster Can Deliver More than Three TeraFLOPS of Peak Computing Power -- The University of Texas (UT) at Austin, the nation's largest university, today introduced a Dell high-performance computing cluster (HPCC) at its Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), to help enable critical research by scientists and engineers across disciplines. The "Lonestar" cluster links 300 standards-based Dell servers designed to provide more than 3 TeraFLOPS (trillion floating point operations per second) of peak computing power for computational-intensive research to help predict weather and climate changes and locate petroleum reserves, among other duties. The university plans to add 200 or more servers to the cluster within a year. "Lonestar is an important and powerful tool for research across The University and an asset to the National Science Foundation Teragrid project," said Michael Dell, CEO and chairman of Dell, in a ceremony today at UT. "Clusters of standardized servers can help organizations maximize their funds. They also can be easily expanded as more computing power is needed." The cluster will provide a flexible and powerful computing platform for research driven across UT's world-class research programs, including those conducted within the recently established Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES) and the Jackson School for Geosciences. The cluster will also be an important tool for continued research between Dell and UT on the performance and management of large-scale clusters and new clustering technologies. "This remarkable resource will place The University of Texas at Austin among the top institutions worldwide in high-performance computing power," said University of Texas President Larry Faulkner. "Lonestar will provide a computing capability of immense value to our research programs in engineering and science, and will give our students and faculty opportunities to use truly cutting-edge computational facilities in their work. We are most grateful to Dell for its farsighted support of such work." Lonestar consists of 300 Dell PowerEdge 1750 and PowerEdge 2650 servers with dual 3.06 GHz Intel(R) Xeon(tm) processors running Red Hat Linux. It connects to Dell PowerVault storage systems and also uses a Myricom Myrinet 2000 switch and 42 Dell PowerConnect switches. Dell services worked with Cray to design and deploy the cluster. For more information Dell's HPCC program, please visit: www.dell.com/hpcc.