U Arkansas Acquires SDSC's Trestles Supercomputer
The University of Arkansas is the proud
new owner of a supercomputer featuring 256 servers, 16.4 terabytes of memory, a
processing speed of 79 teraFLOPs and 8,192 processing cores.
The supercomputer, named Trestles, is being moved from the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the
University of California, San Diego to the Arkansas High Performance Computing (HPC)
Center. The University of Arkansas' existing supercomputer, named Razor,
has a processing speed of 77 teraFLOPs and 4,328 processing cores. The addition
of Trestles will more than double the Arkansas HPC Center's computational
capacity and allow it to run three times as many jobs for researchers.
SDSC and UC San Diego originally deployed Trestles in 2010 with a $2.8
million grant from the National Science
Foundation (NSF), and the supercomputer was "recognized as the leading
science gateway platform in the NSF's eXtreme Digital (XD) Network, a
collaborative set of compute and storage resources in the United States that scientists
can use for advanced computational and data-enabled research," according to
information from the University of Arkansas and SDSC.
Jeff Pummill is one of the interim co-directors of the Arkansas HPC Center.
Last year, through his connections with the NSF's XSEDE (eXtreme Science and Engineering
Discovery Environment) program, Pummill learned that SDSC planned to replace
Trestles with its new petascale Comet supercomputer and the organizations made
arrangements to transfer ownership of Trestles to Arkansas.
In preparation for the installation of Trestles at the Arkansas HPC Center,
the University of Arkansas will decommission the Star of Arkansas
supercomputer, which was activated in 2007 and was once the most powerful
computer in the state.
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].