LSU Powers Up SuperMike-II, A Hybrid SMP Cluster from Dell

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Louisiana State University has announced the addition of the SuperMike-II, a hybrid cluster with Nvidia GPU accelerators and large-memory symmetric multiprocessing. Named after LSU’s original Supermike Linux cluster, the 212 teraflop system is 10 times faster than its immediate predecessor, Tezpur.

Built by Dell, Inc., the $2.6 million SuperMike-II features a total of 440 compute nodes (servers), each of which has 2 Intel Sandy Bridge 8-core processors running at 2.6GHz. Thus the system provides a grand total of 7040 computational cores. The nodes are interconnected by a 40Gbps Mellanox InfiniBand network. While most of the nodes (382) have 32GB of memory, 8 are equipped with 256GB each and joined via ScaleMP software to give a single SMP machine with 128 processing cores and 2TB of memory. Fifty nodes are each equipped with 64GB of memory, and two NVIDIA Tesla M2090 GPUs.

To be used by researchers for applications ranging from coastal modeling to molecular dynamics and protein folding, the SMP component will also allow new work to be done in the area of graph theory, genome sequencing, and quantum mechanics. The GPU accelerators will be utilized for the design of new materials and new medicines using novel computational methods, and will be used to advance LSU’s commitment to digital media research and production facilities. Read the Full Story.