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Computers are getting bigger in Texas, too.
The University of Texas is getting one of the world's most powerful supercomputers, having learned Thursday that it had won a $59 million grant from the National Science Foundation for the big machine.
The new computer, to be built by Sun Microsystems Inc. using 13,000 microprocessors made by Advanced Micro Devices Inc., will be more powerful than any supercomputer currently in operation, UT says.
It will have a peak computing power of more than 400 trillion operations per second, which makes it more than 40 percent faster than the current supercomputing speed champ, Blue Gene/L, developed by IBM Corp. for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
The processor chips to be used in the machine's final configuration will be AMD's quad-core Opteron processors, which will be in production in mid-2007.
UT is teaming with Cornell University in New York and Arizona State University on the project, which is expected to be completed next fall. The federal funds pay for both the computer itself and operating expenses for four years.
It will be by far the largest computer that is attached to the TeraGrid, a National Science Foundation-sponsored network of high-performance computers.
Other, still more powerful machines are being developed for the nation's federal laboratories, but the Texas machine easily vaults UT to the very front ranks of academic supercomputing.
"In many ways, this is the national championship of high-performance computing, and we won it," said Jay Boisseau, director of the Texas Advanced Computing Center, which will run the machine. "We are incredibly excited."
The computing center at the J.J. Pickle Research Campus in North Austin has grown in size and stature since Boisseau became director five years ago.
Its current speed champion, the Dell Lonestar Cluster, begins operating next week.
The computing center employs 60 computer researchers and other technical workers, about five times as many people as it had in 2001. It will add another 15 workers over the next year to help run the new computer, Boisseau said.
The new machine is expected to be used by hundreds of academic and government researchers nationwide, who will apply to a national review committee for approval to use the new machine. Five percent of its capacity will be set aside for other Texas universities, and another 5 percent will be allotted to an industrial partners program.
The machine is expected to handle complex computing problems confronting researchers in dozens of scientific and technical disciplines.
Klaus Schulten, head of the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group at the University of Illinois, said the machine will help researchers better understand how cells work, how viruses infect human cells and how proteins fight obesity within cells. |
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发表于 2006-9-30 13:05
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