The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) has flipped the switch on a new supercomputer called Trestles that debuted at #111 on the list of the top 500 most powerful machines.
Trestles, funded with $2.8 million from the National Science Foundation, is available for use on the TeraGrid, an open-access system for scientific research.
Like a growing number of supercomputers, Trestles uses Flash-based memory, which is speedy and energy efficient. Flash has been a hot topic among researchers of late, including those at Microsoft who are building a speedy Flash bridge between RAM and hard disk.
Trestles is based on “quad-socket, 8-core AMD Magny-Cours compute nodes” linked via InfiniBand. Its 324 nodes each have 32 cores, 64GB of memory and 120GB of Flash memory.
The computer will be used for a variety of applications, including for structural biology researchers and computational chemists. Maybe not so flashy as the IBM Watson computer of Jeopardy! fame, but it will serve a very useful purpose.
