Georgia State University Adds IBM Supercomputer to Support Research

Georgia State University and IBM have announced that the university has purchased an IBM System Cluster 1350 supercomputer through a regional partnership program between IBM and the Southeastern Universities Research Association. This purchase is the latest addition to the school’s expanding inventory of supercomputing resources.

Georgia State is building a diverse and powerful supercomputing center to support a growing body of academic and scientific research. In September 2006 three researchers began working with a new IBM System p5 575 with Power5+ processors running AIX 5.3 – acquired as part of the IBM- Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) regional partnership. Those three users became a dozen in January 2007 and now include more than 40 faculties from many disciplines as well as from other SURA sites such as Virginia Commonwealth University, Louisiana State University and University of Delaware.

The new IBM System Cluster 1350 will help meet this increasing demand. As researchers gain access to more capacity and capability, they naturally are expanding their goals, driving demand. Researchers in chemistry, biology, molecular dynamics, computer science, climate modeling and political science will be among the new machine’s first users. The Cluster 1350 will be add to Georgia State’s high-end IBM System p5 575 supercomputer to offer scientists a range of in-house computing capabilities.

The 320 Intel Xeon Quad-Core processors that make up Georgia State’s new Cluster 1350 will also be shared by SURA – a group of 60 schools that shares supercomputing resources via a grid setup known as SURAgrid. The university’s Cluster 1350 configuration runs at approximately three teraflops, or three billion calculations per second.