Texas A&M Upgrades to New, Faster Supercomputer
Texas A&M University has installed a new $2.1 million supercomputer, nicknamed "Terra,"
which will support research projects such as developing new drugs,
forecasting storm surges and managing energy sources.
Texas
A&M University operates two supercomputers. Terra will replace the
university's Eos supercomputer, which was installed in 2009. Terra has
"10 times the processing power of its predecessor," according to a
report in Texas A&M Today. The new system was primarily funded by
the university's Division of Research and the College of Geosciences, and it will be available to researchers throughout the university.
"With
the processing power of Terra, the faculty and researchers in the
College of Geosciences will get results more quickly and more
accurately than ever before," Jack Baldauf, executive associate dean
and associate dean for research in the College of Geosciences, told
Texas A&M Today. "In addition, Terra will encourage our researchers
across campus to seek out and engage in cutting-edge, interdisciplinary
projects."
Built by Lenovo, Terra features an 8,512-core Lenovo cluster with nodes based on Intel's
64-bit, 14-core Broadwell processors. The system has 304 compute nodes,
256 of which have 64 gigabytes of memory. The other 48 nodes have 128
gigabytes of memory each and are each equipped with one NVIDIA Kepler K80 graphical processing unit (GPU). The system uses an Intel
Omni-Path Architecture interconnection network and has one petabyte of
high-performance storage. Operating at peak performance, Terra can
handle more than 397 teraFLOPs (floating-point operations) per second.
Texas
A&M University's other supercomputer, nicknamed Ada, went live in
September 2014. Ada is a 17,340-core cluster with 852 compute nodes,
most of which are based on Intel's 64-bit, 10-core IvyBridge
processors. Ada has a peak performance of 337 teraFLOPs.
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at leilameyer@gmail.com.