The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego, US, has deployed a new high performance computer (HPC) system named Trestles. The system is based on Quad-socket, eight-Core AMD Opteron compute nodes connected via a QDR InfiniBand Fabric configured by SDSC and Appro, a provider of supercomputing solutions. Available to users of the TeraGrid, the US' largest open-access scientific discovery infrastructure, Trestles is among the five largest systems in the TeraGrid infrastructure, with 10,368 processor cores, a peak speed of 100 Tflops, 20 Tbytes memory, and 38 Tbytes of flash memory.
In November 2009, SDSC announced a five-year, $20 million grant from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) to build and operate Gordon, the first high-performance supercomputer to employ a vast amount of flash memory. Dash, a smaller prototype, was deployed in April 2010 and Gordon will become operational in late 2011. Trestles will be available to TeraGrid users through 2013 and to ensure that productivity remains high, SDSC will adjust allocation policies, queuing structures, user documentation, and training based on a quarterly review of usage metrics and user satisfaction data. All three systems are being integrated by Appro.
