Supercomputer @ UGent

Yesterday, I attended the official launch of the brand new supercomputer at my university. Being one of the pilot users testing the system, I received a nice shiny invitation for this event a few weeks ago.

Although the system won't be made accessible to all researchers at the university until mid April 2009, I've been lucky to be one of the selected few able to play around with it for over a month now.

The system, which was built by IBM/Clustervision, currently consists of 194 blades, each having two quad core Intel Xeon L5420 2.5GHz processors with 12MB of L2 cache (Core2 architecture) and 16GB of memory, for a grand total of 1552 cores and 3.1TB of memory. The blades are connected through an Infiniband network, proving a stunning 20Gb/s, and there's roughly 60TB of storage space, using GPFS as file system. All this is enough for the 496th place in the top 500 of supercomputers (last updated Nov. 2008). *drool*

It has proven to be remarkably stable during the pilot phase, which is a significant improvement over BEGrid, our current main source of computing power. But of course, the system won't be tested to its limits until the first few days after it goes live...
The support from the admins in terms of communication, maintenance and software, has been outstanding so far. All this is a crucial, in order to ensure that the system will be used to its full capacity.
All in all, it seems like the investment of over €1M has been well worth it.

Now, all we'll have to do is come up with something useful to do with it... ;-)