On Friday, Indiana University debuted what school officials called the first petaflop supercomputer to be a dedicated university resource. Keeping in line with Hoosier pride (and their previous supercomputer), the new academic resource is called Big Red II.
"It's important that this is a university-owned resource," said the director of science for Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, Paul Messina, according to a Network World piece on the dedication. "Here you have the opportunity to have your own faculty, staff, and students get access with very little difficulty to this wonderful resource."
Big Red II is a Cray-built machine with a max performance ceiling of one petaflop. For a frame of reference, IBM's Roadrunner supercomputer became the first to reach petaflop performance in 2008 and remained the fastest in the world until the end of 2009. It was recently taken offline and set to be dismantled despite still being among the Top 25 fastest supercomputers in the world. The world's fastest supercomputer as of November 2012—Titan at the Oak Ridge National Laboratories—can hit a speed of 17.6 petaflops. A petaflop is one quadrillion floating point operations per second, or a million billion.
An IU release on Big Red II says the system will be used for research on a variety of topics: medicine and physics to fine arts and global climate research. "There are other universities that hold legal title to computers as fast or faster than Big Red II, but IU is the first in the world to have its own one petaflop supercomputer as a dedicated university resource," said Craig Stewart, executive director of the IU Pervasive Technology Institute and associate dean of research technologies. "Big Red II will be used by IU, for IU to support IU's activities in the arts, humanities, and sciences, and to support the economic development of Indiana—without any constraints from an outside funding agency."
Network World went on to describe more of the system's specifics. It contains a total of 21,824 processor cores, 43,648GB of RAM, and 180TB of local storage. Big Red II uses GPU-enabled and standard CPU compute nodes, with the 344 CPU nodes using two 16-core AMD Abu Dhabi processors and the 676 GPU nodes using one 16-core AMD Interlagos and one NVIDIA Kepler K20.
Big Red II replaces Big Red (which debuted in 2006). That supercomputer only reached speeds of 28 teraflops, so the sequel is a significant jump. In his speech, Messina said that this new system should help the university tremendously, attracting both big research dollars and top notch faculty talent.
reader comments
38