Tungsten cluster comes online
Tungsten, a cluster with more than 1,450 dual-processor Dell PowerEdge 1750 servers running Red Hat Linux, a Myrinet 2000 high-speed interconnect fabric, and an I/O subcluster with more than 120 terabytes of DataDirect storage, becomes available for research. The machine achieved a Linpack benchmark performance—the figure used to compile the Top500 list—of 9.8 teraflops (9.8 trillion calculations per second), which at the time rated fourth fastest in the world.
“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.”