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Austin, Texas, University Installs Powerful Supercomputer

Posted on: Friday, 3 October 2003, 06:00 CDT

Oct. 4--AUSTIN, Texas--University of Texas officials Friday unveiled the most powerful supercomputer for academic research in Texas.

The $2.5 million computer system, dubbed "Lonestar," runs on 300 Dell servers using Linux software.

At a news conference, Michael Dell hailed Lonestar as part of a trend away from big-box supercomputers toward computing clusters, powerful servers with high-end processors hooked together to maximize computing power.

The new clusters can crunch huge amounts of data and tackle the world's computational problems much faster and cheaper than in the past. The technology began to take off in the early '80s and has become increasingly popular.

Commercial applications of Dell's computing clusters include Volvo using them to evaluate crash test results and start-up biotechnology companies using them for drug discovery and gene mapping.

"A number of our customers have told us that computer clusters are 10 times less expensive than alternative forms," Dell said. He noted that his company has 37 percent market share for high-performance computer clusters.

The Lonestar system, comprised of 300 servers with two processors each, can make more than 3 trillion computations per second. Researchers will use the system to help discover new oil reserves, chart the course of meteors, find new planets, reduce pollution, cure diseases, predict weather and more.

"Researchers can now try to understand the world in greater detail and greater accuracy than before," said Jay Boisseau, director of the university's Texas Advanced Computing Center.

UT plans to add 200 more computers to the Lonestar system later this year, Boisseau said.

Dell worked with Cray Computer to design and install the Lonestar cluster, a bank of three 6-foot tall cabinets containing black servers with blinking blue lights. It all sits in an air-conditioned room at UT's J.J. Pickle Research Campus in North Austin.

Even though Cray worked with Dell on the project, Cray CEO Jim Rottsolk doesn't share Dell's vision of computing clusters replacing Cray's big-box supercomputers.

"Cray and Dell represent opposite ends of the system," he said during a panel discussion.

While clusters are good at tackling large but simple problems, he said, Cray's systems still tackle the world's most complex problems.

The University of Texas uses both supercomputers and clusters to solve problems involving large amounts of data, Boisseau said. He believes the Lonestar system represents a general trend toward high-performance computing clusters.

Computing clusters will be the tool of choice and of necessity moving forward in all of the science and engineering industries, said Peter Freeman with the National Science Foundation.

The university expects that some of the discoveries made using the Lonestar system eventually will make their way to the commercial sector, but its main purpose is scientific research.

"The reason we are doing this is it is extremely important for the science of the 21st century," said Juan Sanchez, UT's vice president of research.

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(c) 2003, San Antonio Express-News. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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