Dimensions_of_Discovery

Spring2012

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ITaP Purdue Debuts One of Nation's Fastest Supercomputers When it comes to predicting hazardous weather like torna- does and blizzards, the more detailed the model, the better. No wonder then that Michael Baldwin, an assistant professor in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, likes what he sees from Purdue's new Carter community cluster supercomputer. "We need as much computing capability as we can get to make our forecasts as detailed as possible," Baldwin says of the supercomputer, which will be widely available to faculty members this spring. "Carter is running twice as fast as the su- percomputer we were using and is using only half of the nodes. That will allow us to scale our models for better forecasts." Top ranked Ed Lee serves as project leader for Purdue's Carter Supercomputer, the nation's fastest supercomputer dedicated to campus use. Carter was built through a partnership among Purdue, HP, Intel and Mellanox using upcoming technologies. Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP) partnered with Intel, HP and Mellanox to build Carter, which is ranked 54th on the current TOP500 list of the world' powerful supercomputers. It's also among the half dozen most powerful machines at s most U.S. academic institutions and is the most powerful on a U.S. campus where the research computing facilities are not part of a federally funded laboratory. "The Carter cluster is offering Purdue faculty access to the latest computing tech- nology well before most of their colleagues at other institutions," says John Camp- bell, ITaP's associate vice president for research computing. "Carter also will provide the same reliable service as the other community clusters — and more computing power for each dollar invested by faculty partners." ITaP, with help from faculty researchers such as Baldwin, is completing the final test- Alumnus Carter elped ake a ousehold ame ing and benchmarking of the system in preparation for full production. Experience so far shows Carter can increase application performance up to 70 percent compared to current generation processors. The cluster should allow for larger, quicker and more de- tailed simulations on topics ranging from climate change to stem cells in cancer research. Eco-friendly The new Carter cluster is part of Purdue' a cooperative in which faculty members pool research funds to purchase computing resources in partnership with ITaP and its Rosen Center for Advanced Computing. The cluster features the not-yet-released Xeon E-5 Sandy Bridge Intel processors s award-winning Community Cluster Program, and HP ProLiant servers, 648 HP compute nodes with two 8-core Intel processors (16 cores per node), 32 GB of memory and a 500 GB system disk. All nodes have 56 Gbps Infiniband connections and a 5-year warranty. The technology is also environmentally friendly. Carter placed 38th on the latest Green500 list of the world's 500 most energy-efficient supercomputers, as rated by their performance per watt of power consumed. Carter is energy efficient because the Intel microprocessors inside it provide more computing muscle with fewer processors than prior systems, making the new super- computer less power hungry and easier to cool. The Sandy Bridge chips also include special power saving features. Faculty members interested in capacity in the Carter cluster should contact rcac- cluster-purchase@purdue.edu. Writer: Greg Kline is a science and technology writer for Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP). Spring 2012 5 In two words and five musical notes, Den- nis Carter helped make Intel microproces- sors, like those in the new Carter cluster supercomputer named for him, a familiar and trusted brand. Carter, who received his master's degree in electrical engineering from Purdue in 1974, is credited with the famous "Intel Inside" market- ing campaign, which developed awareness of the microprocessor as the key ingredient in a personal computer. It also put Intel's logo on the outside of a majority of the world's PCs and made its five-note jingle one of the most recognizable tunes on television. As the PC era dawned in the 1980s, Carter, who also was an instructor of elec- trical engineering technology at Purdue, saw a need for Intel to begin talking to a broad audience beyond design engineers, its traditional focus. He developed an in- novative cooperative advertising program to promote Intel's microprocessors as the "computer inside the computer." He also worked with Intel President Andy Grove to create the iconic Pentium microprocessor brand name. Dennis Carter Dennis Carter Purdue University photo/Andrew Hancock

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