Steven Mackay writes that Virginia Tech’s new “HokieSpeed” supercomputer will be a veritable “War Horse” for researchers working on diverse science.
You may remember how Virginia Tech crashed the supercomputing arena in 2003 with System X, a novel Apple server cluster powered by the company’s G5 processors. Ranked at number 96 on the TOP500 and number 11 on the Green500, the new HokieSpeed supercomputer is 22 times faster and yet a quarter of the size of X, with a double-precision peak of 240 teraflops.
HokieSpeed is a versatile heterogeneous supercomputing instrument, where each compute node consists of energy-efficient central-processing units and high-end graphics-processing units,” said Wu Feng, associate professor with the Virginia Tech College of Engineering’s computer science and electrical and computer engineering departments. “This instrument will empower faculty members, students, and staff across disciplines to tackle problems previously viewed as intractable or that required heroic efforts and significant domain-specific expertise to solve.”
Each HokieSpeed node contains two 2.40-gigahertz Intel Xeon E5645 6-core central processing units, and two NVIDIA M2050/C2050 448-core GPUs, which reside on a Supermicro 2026GT0TRF motherboard.
HokieSpeed is now in the final stages of acceptance testing. Read the Full Story.
