UT's Track II supercomputer

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According to HPCwire today the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) at the University of Tennessee held a dedication ceremony yesterday to kick of plans for its $65M Track II award which will result in a big ‘ol Cray at first…

The system, a Cray XT4 dubbed Kraken (after a gargantuan sea creature in Norse mythology), will come online in mid-summer and is expected to feature more than 18,000 2.3GHz AMD high-performance cores delivering 170 teraflops of performance. A new Cray-designed interconnect, featuring Cray SeaStar2 chips and high-speed links, will greatly increase reliability and provide for excellent scaling while eliminating the related cost and complications of external switches.

…and then an even bigger Cray

The Cray XT4 will ultimately evolve into a Baker system featuring more than 10,000 compute sockets, 100 trillion bytes of memory, and 2,300 trillion bytes of disk space. It will provide more than 700 million CPU hours per year and one petaflops of performance, making it the nation’s most powerful academic supercomputer.

…Allocations on the NICS system may be requested via the TeraGrid proposal form. Details about the types and sizes of awards are found at Teragrid Allocations and Accounts (http://www.teragrid.org/userinfo/access/allocations.php), or by calling TeraGrid (toll-free at 1-866-907-2383). NICS is currently fielding requests for projects that will make effective use of more than 10,000 cores for capability jobs. Due to the fact that Kraken is an NSF-funded system, all open science research in the United States is valid for consideration. However, those overseas are also welcome to apply if they are currently working with a researcher based in the United States.

You can find out more at the NICS website: www.nics.tennessee.edu.