Indiana University (IU) unveiled today Big Red II, an uber-powerful supercomputer with a mind-boggling processing speed of one thousand trillion floating-point operations per second (one petaFLOPS), the fastest supercomputer dedicated solely to university research to date.
Big Red II now replaces the original Big Red computer, which came to life in 2006. The revamped mega-machine is 25 times faster than the original and was brought about to enable new high-tech, next-gen research in a slew of fields, including but not limited to medicine, physics, fine arts and climate research.
"There are other universities that hold legal title to computers as fast or faster than Big Red II, but IU is the first in the world to have its own one petaFLOPS supercomputer as a dedicated university resource," said Craig Stewart, IU Pervasive Technology Institute executive director and associate dean of research technologies. "Big Red II will be used by IU, for IU to support IU's activities in the arts, humanities and sciences, and to support the economic development of Indiana, without constraints from an outside funding agency."
Big Red II is a Cray-built computer that utilizes GPU-enabled as well as standard CPU compute nodes to offer one petaFLOPS of maximum processing performance. For the non-technophiles in the audience, this means that Big Red II is able to compute in one second the number of calculations it would take one person using a calculator to perform one calculation per second, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year for more than 31 million years.
In terms of other spec specifics, each of Big Red II's 344 CPU nodes uses two 16-core AMD Abu Dhabi processors. The 676 GPU nodes use one 16-core AMD Interlagos and one NVIDIA Kepler K20. The machine boasts 21,824 total processing cores, 43,648GB of RAM and 180TB local storage. Big Red II runs on Cray's Linux "environment," which is based on SUSE, all of this according to Network World's Jon Gold.
In addition to helping aid in furthering IU's academic pursuits to almost unfathomable lengths, Big Red II is expected to provide a significant boost to state economic development as well.
"The original Big Red helped IU scientists and scholars bring $253 million in grant funding to the state, which in turn created jobs and boosted our economy," said Brad Wheeler, IU vice president for information technology and CIO. "Big Red II is expected to again further Indiana's research funding competitiveness."
(SOURCE)
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