News Release

High-performance cluster purchase
adds computing muscle at UNC

CHAPEL HILL -- The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Information Technology Services (ITS) has announced the purchase of a 1024 processor cluster from Dell Computer Corp., creating a powerful and cost-effective platform for innovative research via complex computational analysis.

The cluster significantly adds to the university’s computational capabilities and provides an additional seven teraflops of computing capacity for UNC’s research community. The university’s current resources are fully utilized, and the additional capacity is needed to accommodate new work and to provide sufficient resources to perform large, and increasingly complex, computational runs becoming more common in the field of research.

The Dell cluster will be installed in November and will join a Silicon Graphics shared-memory, symmetric multiprocessor computing and storage system that was deployed in April 2005. The SGI Altix system, called Cypress, is the largest university Altix installation in the Southeast. Cypress consists of 128 Intel Itanium 2 processors running the Linux operating system, 512 gigabytes of globally accessible memory and 20 terabytes of SGI locally attached storage.

"We are extremely excited to make this resource available in support of university research," said Dr. Daniel A. Reed, Chancellor’s Eminent professor and vice chancellor for information technology at UNC. "We are deploying a world-class capability for interdisciplinary research, technology transfer, economic development and engagement in North Carolina."

The new Dell cluster employs 512 PowerEdge 1855 servers equipped with dual Intel EM64T 3.6 GHz processors and four gigabytes of memory. The Infiniband interconnect linking the nodes can transfer 800 gigabits of data per second, enabling higher performance for long-running, highly parallel applications. Accompanying the computational power will be 40 terabytes of disk storage from DataDirect Networks.

The increased computing power available on campus will enable UNC scientists to perform rapid, on-demand computational runs, such as those recently done by two UNC marine scientists in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Drs. Brian Blanton and Rick Luettich, marine scientists with UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences, were asked by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to use their three-dimensional computer program, ADCIRC, to model water levels and flows in the Gulf region following Katrina.

The request called for a complex simulation to generate the calculations needed to assist NOAA’s Coast Survey Development Laboratory in developing forecasts to predict the circulation of polluted floodwaters.

When the new cluster is in place, Blanton and Luettich will be able to run simulations of this type at UNC.

"This infusion of computational power will enable us to quickly simulate and predict storm surges associated with severe weather, like the recent Katrina, Ophelia and Rita hurricanes," said Luettich. "We will be able to provide high-resolution water level and flooding forecasts for the Gulf – or the North Carolina coast – and to make the information available quickly to appropriate local, state and federal emergency management agencies."

"The new Dell cluster and the SGI Altix system mean that North Carolina now has major computational resources to match its top-tier research community," said Reed, who is also director of the interdisciplinary Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI). "These are the kinds of resources that enable breakthrough discoveries, and we are making them the foundation of a world-class cyberinfrastructure."

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Note: Reed can be reached at (919) 966-1585 or dan_reed@unc.edu.

Related links:
UNC computer, marine scientists collaborate: http://www.unc.edu/news/archives/sep05/luettich092805.htm
RENCI: http://www.renci.org
UNC Institute of Marine Sciences: http://www.marine.unc.edu/IMS
Altix Information: http://www.unc.edu/atn/asg/scitool/get_started_altix.html

UNC Information Technology Services contact: Audrey Ward, (919) 843-9070 or warda@email.unc.edu