News Release

UNC-based research computing clusters
take 74, 104 in world's top 500

CHAPEL HILL - The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Dell research computing cluster, called Topsail, is among the world's top 75 supercomputers, as ranked by the Top500 Project. Ocracoke, another cluster housed at UNC, is 104th.

The project, which began in 1993, tracks and detects trends in high-performance computing. Twice a year, it compiles a list of the world's most powerful computers. Supercomputers are important because the modeling and solution of complex problems across multiple scientific domains requires massive computing resources, well beyond the capabilities provided on desktop computers or small systems.

The new rankings, the project's 27th, rate the BlueGene/L System, a joint effort of IBM and the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, as the world's top supercomputer. Less than a third of the ranked supercomputers are housed at colleges and universities; most are found in industry and business settings. Carolina is one of just 16 college and university campuses in North America with a top-105 ranked supercomputer.

"This caliber of computing resources is essential to make breakthrough research possible and to build Carolina's reputation as a research powerhouse in both academia and industry," said Dr. Dan Reed, UNC's vice chancellor for information technology, Chancellor's Eminent Professor of computer science and founding director of the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI). "With our entry onto the Top 500 list, we are showing our commitment to providing a world-class research environment."

The Topsail cluster, run by the university's Information Technology Services unit, has a computational capability of 6.252 teraflops - or trillions of calculations per second - greater than the sum of the computational capabilities of all of the other university research computing systems the unit runs. The cluster, which came in at 74th, has 1,040 central processing units (CPU) that can work together using a high-speed Infiniband interconnect that allows very complex computational problems to be solved in days rather than months.

"Topsail has taken us to the next level of high performance computing," said Ruth Marinshaw, Carolina's acting assistant vice chancellor for research computing. "Information technology allows researchers to solve big science problems that require very large amounts of computing capability."

Ocracoke, with 1,024 compute nodes and a peak capacity of 5.7 teraflops, is run by RENCI, a multidisciplinary enterprise led by Reed and based at UNC in partnership with Duke and N.C. State universities. Ocracoke is RENCI's new IBM Blue Gene/L system.

The Top500 list is compiled by Drs. Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim in Germany, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., and Jack Dongarra at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. The best performance on the Linpack benchmark - the measure of a computer's floating-point rate of execution - is used as a performance measure for ranking the computer systems. The Linpack benchmark is determined by running a computer program that solves a dense system of linear equations.

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Related links:
Top500 site: www.top500.org
Information Technology Services site: www.unc.edu/its
RENCI site: www.renci.org

Information Technology Services contact: Beth Millbank, (919) 843-9201 or beth_millbank@unc.edu
News Services contact: Lisa Katz, (919) 962-2093, lisa_katz@unc.edu