New OSC Supercomputer Named After Civil Rights Activist Ruby Dee

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Officials pose with the freshly installed name plate for the Ruby Cluster.

Officials pose with the freshly installed name plate for the Ruby Cluster.

Today the Ohio Supercomputer Center unveiled their new Ruby supercomputer. Powered by Intel Xeon Phi, the 144 Teraflop HP system is named after Cleveland-born activist Ruby Dee.

Ruby Dee and her husband, Ossie Davis, were very active in the Civil Rights Movement, participating in marches and speaking out for racial equality. In 1995, she and Davis were awarded the American National Medal of the Arts from the National Endowment of the Arts in Washington, D.C.OSC typically dedicates its systems with an honorary name to recognize “trailblazers” who have connections to the State of Ohio. Some earlier examples include astronaut and statesman John Glenn, sharpshooter and women’s advocate Annie Oakley, and digital art pioneer Chuck Csuri.

Ruby Dedication Event from OH-TECH on Vimeo.

Ruby cluster

Ruby cluster

The Ruby Cluster was built last year in limited scope as a research machine to test combinations of new accelerator technologies. Recently, the system was boosted to 4800 Intel Xeon cores with Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors on 20 nodes and Nvidia Tesla K40 GPUs on another 20 nodes. With this upgrade, Ruby provides nearly the same amount of total computing power (~144 TeraFLOPS) as OSC’s former flagship system Oakley using less than half the number of nodes (240 nodes).

This new cluster is a boon for Ohio for many reasons – it promotes continued collaboration and efficiency around the state, it supports and strengthens our commercialization efforts, it helps to train a high-tech workforce, and its availability will increase the quality of the education and research here,” said Chancellor John Carey. “I’m eager to see how OSC’s university and industry researchers will use the Ruby Cluster to further strengthen our state.”

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