Today Indiana University unveiled the Big Red II supercomputer, a hybrid petascale Cray system.
There are other universities that hold legal title to computers as fast or faster than Big Red II, but IU is the first in the world to have its own one petaFLOPS supercomputer as a dedicated university resource,” said Craig Stewart, IU Pervasive Technology Institute executive director and associate dean of research technologies. “Big Red II will be used by IU, for IU to support IU’s activities in the arts,humanities and sciences, and to support the economic development of Indiana, without any constraints from an outside funding agency.”
The new system is a next-generation Cray XK supercomputer, specifically crafted for IU’s needs. Housed in the university’s state-of-the-art Data Center, Big Red II has more than 21,000 computer processor cores (compared to Big Red’s 4,100). Big Red II will support big data applications in computational research. To further advance Big Data research, IU is also implementing a new disk storage system called the Data Capacitor II (DCII), a five petabyte, high speed/high bandwidth storage system.
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