Contact: Phil Hearn
Roger Smith, surrounded by MSU's Maverick supercomputer
Mississippi State University's newest supercomputer is 12th among American universities in high-performance computing power, according to the latest "Top500 Supercomputing sites" list.
Located at MSU's ERC-formerly the Engineering Research Center-the IBM system dubbed "Maverick" also is identified as the world's 158th most powerful unit in June rankings recently released by the universities of Tennessee and Mannheim (Germany).
Maverick ranks 16th overall among U.S. academic systems, but three institutions on the list each boast two supercomputers ranked ahead of Mississippi State's ERC system. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Illinois ranks first and second. Only Louisiana State University, at No. 9, has a more powerful system in the Southeast.
The Starkville institution also contributes to the state of Mississippi's overall supercomputing power, which now ranks seventh in the nation and first in the Southeast.
"The combination of IBM servers and new InfiniBand technology gives us a nearly 400 percent increase in processing power over our previous cluster," said ERC senior systems administrator Roger Smith. Maverick was installed last November at a cost of more than $1 million, he added.
Focusing on computational science and engineering, the ERC helps businesses and researchers tackle tough questions. It will take advantage of the increased computing power for a wide variety of projects that include computational fluid dynamics, remote sensing, computational physics, aerospace design, and automotive research.
"The ERC has pioneered advanced clustered computing systems for 17 years and is widely recognized for important research and development initiatives, and for adoption of next-generation technologies," said Trey Breckenridge, the ERC's high performance computing resources and operations administrator.
The ERC includes the centers for Advanced Vehicular Systems, Computational Sciences, and Department of Defense Programming Environment and Training, as well as the GeoResources Institute and the Computational Simulation and Design Center. Total ERC research expenditures were $34 million in fiscal year 2004.
Maverick represents the world's largest diskless InfiniBand supercomputer, an IBM clustered system that uses InfiniBand technology to speed communications between 192 servers and 384 processors. The advanced connectivity technology is provided by Bedford, Mass.-based Voltaire Inc.
"All of these are connected together with a really high-speed network called InfiniBand," said Smith. "The fact that Voltaire was willing to work with us in doing something as exotic as this was one of the reasons we chose them. We are really pushing the envelope in regard to what other institutions are doing."
While a normal desktop computer network processes 100 million bits or 100 megabits per second, the InifiBand network processes 10 billion bits or 10 gigabits per second, Smith explained. He said Maverick can perform 1,389 billion calculations per second compared to 366 billion calculations per second by the ERC's previous system.
"None of the Maverick systems have any hard drives in them," Smith added. "They're all diskless. There's only one hard drive in the entire network. That saves us a lot of money in the purchase of hard drives."
He said the Maverick system is utilized only by ERC researchers, and runs at nearly 100 percent utilization, 24 hours a day.
NEWS EDITORS/DIRECTORS: For more information, telephone Smith at (662) 325-3625.