NCSA adds two new supercomputers
NCSA will give a powerful boost to researchers in academia and industry with the addition of two new supercomputing clusters. The two systems, Abe and T3, will provide 110 teraflops (trillions of calculations per second) of computing power, more than doubling NCSA’s total capacity to more than 146 teraflops.
Abe, named in honor of 16th president Abraham Lincoln, has a peak performance of more than 88 trillion calculations per second (88.3 teraflops). The system was purchased with funds from the state of Illinois and will be shared by researchers at the University’s new Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies, headed by NCSA Director Thom Dunning, and by the national science and engineering communities served by the National Science Foundation.
Abe is a Dell blade system with 1,200 PowerEdge 1955 dual-socket, quad-core Intel Xeon 2.3 GHz processors, and InfiniBand and GigE connections. Each processor has 4 gigabytes of memory, providing a system total of 9.6 terabytes. The InfiniBand interconnect provides high-speed communication capability, enabling users to run tightly coupled applications that achieve high levels of scaling.
T3 is the successor to T2, a Dell cluster that has been used extensively by NCSA’s industrial partners since it came online. T3 is a Dell blade system with 1,040 dual-core 2.66 GHz Intel processors, an InfiniBand interconnect, 4.1 terabytes of total memory, and a 20 terabyte Lustre filesystem. The peak performance of T3 is 22.1 teraflops.