NCSA to Add 62TF of Compute Power with New Heterogeneous System

By DE Editors

Installation has begun on a new computational resource, called Lincoln, at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA; Urbana, IL) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Lincoln will deliver peak performance of 62.3 teraflops (TF) and is designed to push the envelope in the use of heterogeneous processors for scientific computing. The system is expected to be online in October, bringing NCSA's total computational resources to nearly 170 teraflops.

Lincoln will consist of 192 compute nodes (Dell PowerEdge 1950 III dual-socket nodes with quad-core Intel Harpertown 2.33GHz processors and 16GB of memory) and 96 NVIDIA Tesla S1070 accelerator units. Each Tesla unit provides 500 gigaflops of double-precision performance and 16GB of memory.

Lincoln's InfiniBand interconnect fabric will be linked to the interconnect fabric of Abe, the 89TF cluster that is currently NCSA's largest resource. This will enable certain applications to run across the entire complex, providing a peak performance of 15TF.

NCSA's Innovative Systems Laboratory has worked with researchers in many disciplines, from weather modeling to biomolecular simulation, to explore the use of many-core processors, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and other novel architectures as accelerators for scientific computing. The center maintains a 16-node research cluster, called QP, which includes hardware donated by NVIDIA.

NCSA and its collaborators have experienced speed-ups on a number of applications, including a chemistry direct SCF code, the NAMD molecular dynamics code, and the WRF weather forecasting and research code.

For details, contact NCSA.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company's website.