University of Minnesota Announces New HP Cluster

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The University of Minnesota Institute for Advanced Computational Research [MSI] announced today that they have purchased a new HPC platform based on HP ProLiant blade servers.  More specifically, 1,083 BL280 G6-flavored nodes housing 8,664 cores is now crunching away on the data center floor.  The new system, called “Itasca”, delivers 97 TFlops of peak performance and enough “real” performance to put the machine at #67 of the latest Top500 list.  The whole package is tied together with a 40Gbps QDR Infiniband interconnect.

Today, high-demand computation is absolutely central to a wide array of important research areas that are vital to putting the University of Minnesota in a leadership position,” said Tom Jones, interim director of MSI. “This new computing system is a big step above what most other universities can call on, so our faculty and students are really excited by the big boost in computational resources they will have to drive the frontiers of knowledge.”

To maximize the effectiveness of their new supercomputer, MSI needed high system performance combined with ease of deployment and energy efficiency,” said Steve Cumings, director of marketing, scalable computing and infrastructure at HP. “MSI’s choice of HP ProLiant BL280c blade servers for their new system shows its value in a complex HPC environment, enabling MSI to expand their support and speed of active research, ultimately driving innovation.”

MSI will have over 4,000 users from many different disciplines utilize the new resource.  For more info, read the full release here.