Contact: Jim Laird
STARKVILLE, Miss.--Mississippi State University is now home to one of the world's greenest supercomputers, according to the newly released Green500 list.
The list ranks the MSU supercomputer, named Talon, as the most energy efficient general-purpose supercomputer in the world, and the ninth most energy efficient system overall. Green500 rates the world's most powerful supercomputers by the number of calculations performed for every watt of power that they consume.
"The top eight systems all use very specialized IBM Cell processors or hybrid GPU approaches to achieve their efficiency, and while those systems are excellent for a limited set of applications, they can't currently be used for many of the things that we do," said Trey Breckenridge, computing office administrator for the university's High Performance Computing Collaboratory, often referred to as HPC2.
Talon is five times faster than the university's previous fastest system, while consuming less than one-half the electricity, and performs nearly 420 million calculations for every watt of electricity it uses.
The supercomputer is an IBM iDataPlex cluster and has 3,072 processor cores, using six-core Intel Xeon processors, and more than six terabytes of RAM. It uses a high-speed quad data rate InfiniBand network provided by Voltaire Inc., and has a peak performance of more than 34 trillion calculations per second.
"If you took a pen and paper, and did one long division problem per second, working 24 hours a day, this computer could calculate in one second what it would take you one million years to do by hand," Breckenridge said.
Talon is located at the HPC2 facility in the Thad Cochran Research, Technology and Economic Development Park adjacent to the MSU campus in Starkville. The supercomputer will support research for the land-grant institution's Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems, Center for Computational Sciences, Geosystems Research Institute, and the Northern Gulf Institute. The system will run a broad set of applications for projects including computational materials analysis, computational fluid dynamics, hurricane prediction, and computational biology.
Recently, Talon debuted on the June 2010 Top500 Supercomputer Sites List as the No. 331 most powerful computer in the world, and the No. 18 fastest computer at any university in the nation. Mississippi is ranked No. 8 nationally in total supercomputing power, with ranked systems at MSU and at both the Army Corps of Engineers and Navy DoD Supercomputing Resource Centers located in Vicksburg, and the NASA John C. Stennis Space Center in Bay St. Louis.