Supercomputing on a budget: UIUC's cluster among the top 30.

With the dedication last month of the Turing Cluster at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), researchers have entered the realm of world class supercomputing--at bargain prices. Named for computer science pioneer Alan Turing, the cluster is powered by 640 dual processor 1U rack-mount Xserve G5 servers from Apple Computer. It is expected to deliver a peak performance of up to six teraflops, a ten-fold increase over the previous UIUC cluster it replaces. With that computational muscle, the Turing Cluster currently ranks in the top 30 most powerful supercomputers in the world.

The Turing Cluster will be used to simulate complex physical phenomena and engineering processes such as rocket simulations and atmospheric predictions. The cluster will also aid in the development of hardware designs and software systems for next generation high performance computer systems, and cluster-based computer technologies for graphics-intensive applications.

Besides power, the UIUC is unique for its cost, says Michael Heath, director of Computational Science and Engineering, which operates the Turing Ouster. "We probably would have been hard pressed to get a system half this size from another vendor," he says. "We put this cluster together with no direct contribution from the federal government."

The Turing Cluster will be available to local researchers, scientists and the university's 3,500 students.