Dive Summary:
- Indiana University (IU) has unveiled its new supercomputer, Big Red II, which has a peak processing speed of one quadrillion floating-point operations per second, or one petaflop; the school plans to use Big Red II almost exclusively for research.
- Craig Stewart, executive director of IU's Pervasive Technology Institute and associate dean of research technologies, said, "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 petaflop supercomputer as a dedicated university resource."
- To get an idea of how powerful the supercomputer is, a problem that would take a human being 31 million years to calculate would take Big Red II only one second; IU also estimated the new system would speed up an analysis of human genome alignment from six months to eight days.
From the article:
"... Network World went on to describe more of the system's specifics. It contains a total of 21,824 processor cores, 43,648GB of RAM, and 180TB of local storage. Big Red II uses GPU-enabled and standard CPU compute nodes, with the 344 CPU nodes using two 16-core AMD Abu Dhabi processors and the 676 GPU nodes using one 16-core AMD Interlagos and one NVIDIA Kepler K20.
Big Red II replaces Big Red (which debuted in 2006). That supercomputer only reached speeds of 28 teraflops, so the sequel is a significant jump. In his speech, Messina said that this new system should help the university tremendously, attracting both big research dollars and top notch faculty talent."
