Cornell Theory Center acquires 128 processor Dell cluster

Velocity+ consists of 64 dual Pentium III 733 Mhz processors, with 2 Gigabytes RAM per node, 27 Gigabytes of disk space (RAID 0), and full 64-way Giganet Interconnect. Velocity+ brings to 472 the total number of processors in the Velocity complex. The system runs Microsoft Windows 2000, which is key to the seamless desktop-to-HPC model that CTC is pursuing.

One of the strategic applications lined up to run on Velocity+ comes from CTC's Parallel Processing Resource for Biomedical Scientists, which is funded by the National Center for Research Resources. Ron Elber, lead scientist for the Resource has already seen exciting results in his new stochastic path approach for modelling protein dynamics applied to hemoglobin. His group has captured the essential dynamics of the hemoglobin switching process using STO (part of his MOIL package) on up to 96 processors with near linear speedup. Elber's software has been optimised for Windows-based systems. The packages are made available free to the scientific community.

World-renowned scientist, Harold A. Scheraga, will also have a strategic application running on Velocity+. Scheraga's group conducts groundbreaking research in the ab initio solution of protein folding, applying fundamental physics - first principles - to solve the structures of proteins.