Podcast: 18 Petaflop Stampede 2 Supercomputer Powers Research at TACC

In this Texas Standard podcast, Dan Stanzione from TACC describes Stampede2, the most powerful university supercomputer in the United States.

Built by Dell EMC, Stampede2 is the flagship supercomputer at The University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). A strategic national resource, Stampede2 will provide high-performance computing capabilities to thousands of researchers across the U.S. It will enter full production in fall 2017 as an 18 petaflop system that builds on the successes of the original Stampede cluster it replaces. Phase 1 of the Stampede2 rollout, now complete, features 4,200 Knights Landing (KNL) nodes, the second generation of processors based on Intel’s Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture. Later this summer Phase 2 will add 1,736 Intel Xeon Skylake nodes.

System Specifications:

  • Strategic national resource designed to serve thousands of researchers across the nation
  • 18PF when fully deployed
  • 4,200 Intel Knights Landing nodes, each with 68 cores, 96GB of DDR RAM, and 16GB of high speed MCDRAM
  • 1,736 Intel Xeon Skylake nodes (to be added in fall 2017; specifications to come)
  • 100 Gb/sec Intel Omni-Path network with a fat tree topology employing six core switches
  • Two dedicated high performance Lustre file systems with a storage capacity of 31PB
  • TACC’s Stockyard-hosted Global Shared File System provides additional Lustre storage

Dr. Stanzione is the Executive Director of the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin. A nationally recognized leader in high performance computing, Stanzione has served as deputy director since June 2009 and assumed the Executive Director post on July 1, 2014.

He is the principal investigator (PI) for several leading projects including a multimillion-dollar National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to deploy and support TACC’s Stampede supercomputer over four years. Stanzione is also the PI of TACC’s Wrangler system, a supercomputer designed specifically for data-focused applications. He served for six years as the co-director of CyVerse, a large-scale NSF life sciences cyberinfrastructure in which TACC is a major partner. In addition, Stanzione was a co-principal investigator for TACC’s Ranger and Lonestar supercomputers, large-scale NSF systems previously deployed at UT Austin. Stanzione previously served as the founding director of the Fulton High Performance Computing Initiative at Arizona State University and served as an American Association for the Advancement of Science Policy Fellow in the NSF’s Division of Graduate Education.

Stanzione received his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and his master’s degree and doctorate in computer engineering from Clemson University, where he later directed the supercomputing laboratory and served as an assistant research professor of electrical and computer engineering.

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