SYSTEMS

AUSTIN, TX -- In order to provide increased computational capability to UT researchers, TACC has recently purchased three new HPC systems from IBM: Four Regatta-HPC eServers with 16 POWER4 1.3GHz processors and 16GB memory each; an Intel (IA-64) cluster with 40 Itanium 800MHz processors, 80GB of memory; and an Intel (IA-32) cluster with 64 Pentium III 1GHz processors, 32GB of memory. The highest-end systems are the Regatta-HPC systems. Each system is a 16-way symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) with the latest IBM 1.3GHz POWER4 processors. TACC is the first US purchaser of this particular model, which will be delivered in December. The four systems will have a combined compute capability of 333 Gflops and will comprise the most powerful academic computing system in the state of Texas when integrated into a single system in Q2 '02. In addition to the leading-edge POWER4 processors, each server possesses tremendous memory bandwidth--more than 200GB/s. The Regatta-HPC systems will provide maximum performance for a large number of scientific and engineering applications. The Itanium processor is a new 64-bit Intel architecture. Our 40-processor Itanium cluster will use 800 MHZ versions of this processor with a theoretical peak performance of 3.2 Gflops/processor. This cluster will have 80GB of memory and 1.6TB of distributed local disk to enable large calculations. We are eager to explore how this new processor architecture performs on computational science and engineering applications. The new 64-processor cluster is based on the commodity 32-bit Intel architecture (IA-32) Pentium III processors, running at 1GHz. The system has an aggregate memory of 32GB and a 1.4TB of distributed local storage. “This system is similar to the clusters many research groups build in their labs for price/performance reasons,” said Jay Boisseau, TACC Director. “We have added a high-performance parallel I/O file system with 0.5TB for I/O-intensive applications. We will use this for education and training as well as production computing.” Both Intel-based clusters will utilize the NPACI Rocks cluster software developed and supported by SDSC for NPACI. The Regatta-HPC systems will run IBM's AIX operating system. These systems will substantially upgrade the HPC capabilities TACC provides to the UT user community. We tentatively plan to make all these systems available to UT users in January 2002. Watch for the installation schedule, availability, and training classes for these systems at: www.tacc.utexas.edu