* Sun supercomputer installed at University of Texas
Sun and the University of Texas’ Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) last week unveiled a supercomputer named Maverick that will be used by scientists to visualize weather patterns and predict hurricane movements and floods, among other projects.
Maverick consists of a Sun Fire e25K server with 64 dual-core chips, effectively creating a 128-processor box. It has a half-terabyte of memory and is connected to the National Science Foundation’s TeraGrid. TeraGrid is a distributed infrastructure that connects five sites that can manage and store nearly a petabyte of data. Other sites participating in TeraGrid include the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego; Argonne National Laboratory; and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center at Carnegie Mellon University.
Maverick is a shared-memory symmetric multiprocessing machine that is efficient at handling large data sets and rendering and manipulating data. It is based on Sun’s UltraSparc IV processor, which performs chip multithreading. The server contains eight 2G bit/sec Fibre Channel adapters for attachment to TACC’s storage-area network and multiple Gigabit Ethernet adapters for attachment to the network.
Maverick will deliver 268 gigaflops of performance, compared to IBM’s BlueGene/L, which delivers 36 teraflops. A gigaflop is a billion operations per second; a teraflop is a trillion operations per second.
