LSU's Center for Computation & Technology and the Department of Chemical Engineering have joined forces and purchased an IBM Power7 system in an effort to advance computational science research at CCT and LSU. The acquisition of a high performance computing (HPC) cluster based on the IBM Power7 architecture provides the latest tools to advance existing resources and projects.

The new system, named "Pandora," will support a wide range of computational science activity at CCT and LSU. The new system will support researchers in a broad array of activities, such as state-of-the-art cyberinfrastructure frameworks, domain-specific application development and advanced computational modeling in fluid dynamics, biology, chemistry, oceanography, astrophysics, and materials. The system represents a continuing commitment to the long history of cutting edge computational science at LSU, and will advance interdisciplinary research and the university's Flagship Agenda.

Pandora contains eight 32-core IBM Power 755 nodes running 3.3GHz Power7 processors. These give the system 6.8 teraflops of peak performance. Each Power 755 node is organized as a four 8-core Power7 processors, making it capable of operating at higher core processing speeds than LSU's current high-performance computing systems. The IBM Power 755 platforms are well suited to run highly parallel, computationally intensive workloads, such as weather and climate modeling, quantum chemistry simulations, astrophysics models, materials design, and petroleum reservoir studies.

Pandora will replace the aging Pelican system, an IBM Power5, and will be housed in the Fred C. Frey Computing Services Center. LSU has long understood the potential to advance breakthroughs in many disciplines using high-performance computing technology, and continually makes efforts to provide the most effective equipment to maintain our edge in this area. The new IBM Power7 system provides LSU researchers with access to some of the most advanced computational tools and enables research that could not be achieved before.

"We envision this resource as a stepping stone to Blue Waters, the Power7-based Petascale computer being built and housed at the University of Illinois as NSF's Track 1 leadership class system," said Honggao Liu, Ph.D., LSU's HPC Director.  "The proposed system will advance CCT and LSU in supercomputing technology and enable academic departments and multi-organization collaborations at LSU to operate in well-equipped research environments that provide a direct growth path to national level systems."