PROCESSORS

A Linux cluster installed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is the fourth-fastest computer in the world, according to the Top500 List released at SC2003 in Phoenix. NCSA's cluster, called Tungsten, achieved Linpack benchmark performance—the figure used to compile the Top500 list—of 9.8 teraflops (9.8 trillion calculations per second); this is 64 percent of the 15.3-teraflop peak of the dedicated computational component. The full cluster, including the compute and I/O components, is 17.6 teraflops. "We're extremely proud of this cluster, its performance, and of the group of NCSA and vendor staff who have created a robust, production-ready environment for leading-edge computational science," said NCSA Director Dan Reed. "The cluster is a key component of the 31 total teraflops of computing power NCSA provides to the country's scientists. Greater computational performance is the means to gaining critical knowledge about our world, from the accurate prediction of dangerous weather to the understanding of the molecular roots of disease." The Tungsten cluster will provide long-term, dedicated access for applications teams and has been designed for large-scale computational and I/O capabilities that will enable breakthrough computational results. It employs more than 1,450 dual-processor Dell PowerEdge 1750 servers running Red Hat Linux, a Myrinet 2000 high-speed interconnect fabric, an I/O subcluster with more than 120 terabytes of DataDirect storage, and a dedicated applications development environment. "The Intel Xeon processor family continues to deliver outstanding value and price-performance to our customers even in extremely complex computing environments," said Ajay Malhotra, general manager of Enterprise Marketing & Planning for Intel's Enterprise Platforms Group. "We're delighted to be working with NCSA as they extend their high-performance computing capabilities with Intel architecture as the foundation." The Tungsten cluster soon will enter friendly-user mode and is expected to enter production mode by the end of the year. Scientific users will be able to avoid long waits to run jobs because large fractions of the system will be dedicated to specific projects for extended periods. The cluster will provide a boost in productivity for the researchers who use NCSA computing facilities to investigate many of science's most important questions—the large-scale structure of the universe, the properties of stars, the flow of fluids through channels, the dynamics of biological systems, the design of engineering structures, and the nature of matter itself. The TOP500 list is compiled every six months by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany; Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee. NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) is a national high-performance computing center that develops and deploys cutting-edge computing, networking and information technologies. Located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, NCSA is funded by the National Science Foundation. Additional support comes 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/. --See the NCSA booth at SC2003 (#2333)