University at Buffalo Adds Second Dell Cluster to Track Great Lakes Pollution, Fuel General Research.Business Editors & High-Tech/Education Writers ROUND ROCK, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 20, 2002 Dell Increases Presence on Top 500 List of Supercomputers With High-Performance Clusters The University at Buffalo, The State University of New York International student enrollment UB ranks 10th in the United States for international student enrollment, with about 10 percent of UB undergraduate and graduate students being international. , has added a 300-node Dell (Nasdaq:DELL) high-performance computing High-speed computing, which typically refers to supercomputers used in scientific research. cluster (HPCC HPCC - High Performance Computing and Communications ) to its Center for Computational Research (CCR 1. CCR - condition code register. 2. CCR - (Database) concurrency control and recovery. ). The increased computing capacity will assist with various scientific research projects, including groundwater modeling to help predict the flow of contaminants in large bodies of water such as the Great Lakes, computational chemistry and molecular structure determination. It is the second Dell cluster at the university, adding to the 2,000-node HPCC deployed earlier this year to support research in the university's Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics. CCR, the eighth-largest supercomputing site in the world(a), underscores how standards-based computing systems can perform at high levels for complex research. The 300-node cluster recently achieved 2.004 trillion floating-point operations per second (Teraflops) of sustained performance in the LINPACK benchmark test. "Many of our scientists need to exploit a large number of processors operating in a coordinated fashion to jointly solve leading-edge scientific problems that could not be solved in a reasonable amount of time on smaller systems," said Russ Miller, Ph.D., director of the CCR and UB distinguished professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. "Efficient massively parallel processing techniques can be applied to many scientific problems in order to provide cost-effective solutions via clusters based on standard components. A machine like the Pentium 4-based Dell cluster will be used to dramatically reduce the time to solve problems, in many cases from months to hours." 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 (www.top500.org) indicates that Dell clusters have a cumulative performance of 6.046 TFLOPS See teraFLOPS. , up from 856 Gigaflops (GIGA FLoating point OPerations per Second) One billion floating point operations per second. See FLOPS. (unit) gigaflops - (GFLOPS) One thousand million (10^9) floating point operations per second. (GFLOPS See gigaFLOPS. GFLOPS - gigaflops ) 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 Cornell Theory Center - (CTC) One of four supercomputing centers funded by the US National Science Foundation. The CTC also receives funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Institutes of Health, New York State, IBM Corporation, and other members of the (88), University of Utah The University of Utah (also The U or the U of U or the UU), located in Salt Lake City, is the flagship public research university in the state of Utah, and one of 10 institutions that make up the Utah System of Higher Education. (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). A key reason for the popularity of HPCC for supercomputing applications is the ability to deploy solutions based on standardized technologies at a fraction of the cost of a proprietary supercomputer. "Dell's supercomputing clusters enable customers to scale as they grow, as opposed to paying for overcapacity in the legacy supercomputing model," said Russ Holt, vice president and general manager of Dell's Enterprise Systems Group. "The ability to add power and capacity to address demand is very attractive to customers, and very cost effective." About the University at Buffalo Cluster The University at Buffalo's second cluster is comprised of 300 Dell PowerEdge(tm) 2650 servers, each with dual Intel(R) Xeon(tm) Pentium 4, 2.4 GHz processors running Red Hat Linux Red Hat Linux, assembled by Red Hat, was a popular, "middle-aged" Linux distribution (not as old as Slackware but older than Ubuntu) upon its discontinuation in 2004.[1] Red Hat Linux 1.0 was released on November 3, 1994. . 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 Computational fluid dynamics The numerical approximation to the solution of mathematical models of fluid flow and heat transfer. Computational fluid dynamics is one of the tools (in addition to experimental and theoretical methods) available to solve and materials science. About Dell Dell Computer Corporation (company) Dell Computer Corporation - One of the biggest US manufacturers of IBM PC compatibles. "From notebooks to networks", their slogan says. http://us.dell.com. (Nasdaq:DELL) is a premier provider of products and services required for customers worldwide to build their information-technology and Internet infrastructures. The company's revenue for the past four quarters totaled $33.7 billion. Dell, through its direct business model, designs, manufactures and customizes products and services to customer requirements, and offers an extensive selection of software and peripherals. Information on Dell and its products can be obtained at www.dell.com. Dell is a trademark of Dell Computer Corporation. Dell disclaims any proprietary interest in the marks and names of others. (a) CCR is the eighth-largest supercomputing site according to www.gapcon.com list. |
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