University of Bufallo adds 300-node Dell cluster - number 22 on TOP500 list

CCR, the eighth-largest supercomputing site in the world, underscores how standards-based computing systems can perform at high levels for complex research. The 300-node cluster recently achieved 2.004 Tflop/s of sustained performance in the LINPACK benchmark test.

The University at Buffalo and many other organizations are increasingly choosing HPCC solutions for data intensive analysis as an alternative to proprietary supercomputers. The latest Top 500 List of supercomputers indicates that Dell clusters have a cumulative performance of 6.046 Tflop/s, up from 856 Gflop/s in the previous list.

The new supercomputing cluster at the University at Buffalo is the highest-ranking Dell system on the list at number 22. Other ranking Dell clusters include: Sandia National Labs (32), Cornell Theory Center (88), University of Utah (89), Penn State University (174), Swineburne University (180), a 100-node configuration of the University at Buffalo's first cluster (187), Dell (207) and the University of Notre Dame (461).

The University at Buffalo's second cluster is comprised of 300 Dell PowerEdge 2650 servers, each with dual Intel Xeon(tm) Pentium 4, 2.4 GHz processors running Red Hat Linux. A fully connected Myrinet 2000 high-speed, low latency interconnect network completes the balanced standards-based supercomputer.

CCR researchers will use the cluster for work ranging from groundwater modeling, protein folding, molecular structure determination and computational chemistry to environmental engineering, computational fluid dynamics and materials science.