Rice building Texas’ fastest academic supercomputer

DACONTACT: Jade Boyd
PHONE:
(713) 348-6778
EMAIL: jadeboyd@rice.edu

RICE BUILDING TEXAS’ FASTEST ACADEMIC
SUPERCOMPUTER
Rice Terascale Cluster Among the World’s Fastest University
Computers

Rice University has
secured grant funding from the National Science Foundation and Intel Corporation
to build a supercomputer that will rank among the world’s fastest.

When fully operational
next year, the Rice Terascale Cluster (RTC) will be approximately three times
faster than any university computer in Texas. The RTC will consist of at least
70 interconnected servers containing the powerful new Intel” Itanium” 2
processor.

Housed at Rice’s
Computer and Information Technology Institute (CITI), RTC will be the first
university computer in Texas with a peak performance of 1 teraflop, or 1
trillion floating-point operations per second (FLOPs), the standard measure of
supercomputer performance. The total cost for RTC is undetermined. Funding
includes $1.15 million from the NSF.

Were it operational
today, RTC would rank among the 10 fastest academic supercomputers in the
country and the top 25 university computers worldwide, according to www.top500.org, a semi-annual ranking of the
world’s top supercomputers that is compiled by researchers at the University of
Tennessee and Germany’s University of Mannheim.

The fastest
supercomputer in Texas, according to the list, is the University of Texas at
Austin’s IBM Regatta-HPC Cluster, which has a peak performance of one-third of a
teraflop.

Scientists need faster
computers to tackle increasingly complex mathematical problems that would
require weeks or months to compute on existing machines. For example, to
precisely map the movements of every atom in a large molecule, researchers need
to develop a complex mathematical model that contains thousands of variables.
Such models are useful for drug designers and biomedical researchers, and a
whole new scientific discipline known as bioinformatics has been created to
solve this and other complex biological computations. Increasingly, research
across academic disciplines requires a similar level of complex computation, and
it also requires a new generation of distributed software.

“Rice faculty from
disciplines as diverse as biochemistry, earth science, economics, neuroscience,
computer science and political science will use RTC in their research,” said
Moshe Vardi, RTC principal investigator and CITI director. “It will also be a
vital tool for basic computational research aimed at better designing software
than can run on hundreds or even thousands of processors
simultaneously.”

Rice’s proposal for NSF
funding for RTC faced stiff competition in a process that saw awards for just
one-in-three applicants. Rice won based on independent evaluations by reviewers
who praised CITI’s expertise in high-performance computing, the
interdisciplinary nature of CITI research, and the caliber of the faculty
involved.

Complex research already
slated for RTC includes simulations of biomolecular interactions, the physics of
heavy ion collisions, simulations of Internet-based computer applications
running on hundreds of computers, and simulations that aim to better understand
and predict international conflicts.

RTC is slated to begin
operation in early 2003. Tentative plans call for the cluster to include 70
interconnected HP servers, each containing four 900-megahertz, Itanium 2
processors. The cluster will have more than 500 gigabytes of RAM, and it will be
linked to a 1 terabyte array of dedicated hard drives.

According to
www.top500.org, most of the fastest supercomputers, including the world’s
fastest — the 35.9-teraflop NEC Earth Simulator in Japan — and the United
States’ fastest — the 7.2-teraflop ASCI White-Pacific at Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory in California — are operated by private or government-run
research laboratories. See <http://www.top500.org/list/2002/06/>
for the Top 500 list of supercomputers.