College of Computing at Georgia Tech Unveils New Supercomputing Clusters

The College of Computing at Georgia Tech has installed two Dell high-performance computing clusters (HPCC) at its campus in Atlanta. These supercomputing clusters are made up of 64 and 128 Dell PowerEdge 1850 servers, respectively. For projects requiring an exceptional amount of processing power, the clusters can be joined to create a 192-node supercomputing cluster capable of processing a theoretical maximum of 2.5 trillion floating point operations per second (TFLOPS). "Industry-standard processors and novel distributed architectures are key to our supercomputing strategy," said Rich DeMillo, dean of the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. "Dell is an increasingly important partner in this effort. The clusters we have installed will enable new scientific discoveries that would have been impossible only five years ago." The systems provide both dedicated and campus-wide resources for Georgia Tech's researchers, whose work has helped the university rank among the nation's top research campuses. Researchers plan to use the systems to study complex problems, including the simulation of aircraft designs and the design of future computer chips. John Mullen, vice president of Dell's higher education business, said this computing facility is an excellent example of how universities can get more processing power for their budgets by deploying standards-based clusters. "Dell has been a primary force in driving down the cost of supercomputing by developing solutions that use standards-based technologies," John Mullen, vice president of Dell's higher education business, said. "A growing number of the world's most powerful supercomputers are built using standards-based systems like the ones the College of Computing at Georgia Tech has installed. We look forward to supporting their research efforts."