“The National Center for Supercomputing Applications announced
plans Tuesday to install two IBM Corp. Linux clusters to create the
world’s fastest Linux supercomputers. NCSA’s clusters, which will
be housed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will
have 2 teraflops of computing power. They will be used by
researchers in many scientific fields, including those studying the
nature of gravitational waves, computational biology and
computational chemistry, said Dan Reed, director of NCSA.”
“For now, the fastest Linux supercomputer, LosLobos, is at the
Albuquerque High Performance Computing Center and is ranked 80th on
the most recent Top 500 Supercomputer Sites list. By comparison,
Reed said the new NCSA clusters should be close to the top five in
the world.”
“Basing the new supercomputers on Linux was a no-brainer,
Reed said, because the platform provides users with a familiar
computing environment that covers single-user desktop workstations
and small research clusters to the largest systems. Reed would
not disclose the total cost of the new machines but said it is a
“multimillion-dollar deal by a substantial margin.”