NCSA installs 2 Tflop/s of Linux cluster computing powerChampaign 16 January 2001 NCSA will install two IBM Linux clusters, creating the world's fastest Linux supercomputer in academia. NCSA's clusters will have two Tflop/s of computing power and will be used by researchers to study some of the most fundamental questions of science, such as the nature of gravitational waves first predicted by Albert Einstein in his Theory of Relativity.
"We believe that Linux clusters will soon be the most widely used architecture
for parallel computing, and that these two clusters from IBM are the best way to
deliver terascale performance," said Dan Reed, Director of NCSA and the National
Computational Science Alliance. "The explosion of the open source community, the
maturity of clustering software, and the enthusiasm of the scientific community
all tell us that Linux clusters are the future of high-performance computing."
Reed added that Linux clusters provide users with a single, easy-to-use
computing environment that applies to single-user desktop workstations, small
research clusters, and the largest terascale systems.
The two NCSA Linux clusters will include more than 600 IBM eServer xSeries
running Linux and Myricom's Myrinet cluster interconnect
network. The first cluster, to be installed in February by IBM Global Services,
will be based on IBM eServer x330 thin servers, each with two 1 GHz Intel
Pentium III processors, running Red Hat Linux. The second cluster, to be
installed this summer, will be one of the first to use Intel's next generation
64-bit Itanium processor and will run TurboLinux. The two clusters will
expand the proven capability that NCSA has already demonstrated with Linux
clusters and both Intel architectures.
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