* UT spends $59 million towards buying and maintaining a Sun supercomputer
The Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas has just scored big with a $59 million supercomputer courtesy of the National Science Foundation.
The NSF awarded UT with a grant to build a supercomputer from Sun Opteron-based servers. The supercomputer will be the most powerful supercomputer in the TeraGrid, an NSF-sponsored computer network, and will be used to solve complex computing problems and cellular research.
The supercomputer will be configured in June 2007, operational by the following October and have performance of more than 400 teraflops (40% faster than IBM’s Blue Gene/L at 280 teraflops). The supercomputer will have 100TB of memory and 1.7 petabytes of storage capacity.
It will use Sun Fire x64 “Galaxy” servers, consisting of 13,000 AMD quad-core processors (52,000 total cores), and Sun/StorageTek disk and tape drives. It will be Sun’s largest supercomputer to date.
The $59 million grant will also be used to operate the supercomputer for four years. The supercomputer will be installed at the computing center at the J.J. Pickle Research Campus in Austin, the site of the Dell Lonestar Cluster, which is used to predict weather changes and locate petroleum reserves.
TACC is also the home to the Sparc-based Maverick supercomputer cluster, used by scientists to visualize weather patterns and predict hurricane movements and floods, among other projects. Maverick consists of a single Sun E25000.
