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US National Science Foundation gains new supercomputer

Georgia Tech, along with partner research organisations on the Keeneland Project, including the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, the National Institute for Computational Sciences and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has announced the installation and acceptance of the Keeneland Full Scale System (KFS). Available to the National Science Foundation (NSF) scientific community, this supercomputing system is designed to meet the compute-intensive needs of a wide range of applications through the use of Nvidia GPU technology. In achieving this milestone, KFS is the most powerful GPU supercomputer available for research through NSF’s Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) programme.

For the past 20 months, the Keeneland Initial Delivery System (KIDS) has been used for research in both computer science and computational science, and has included applications in astronomical sciences, atmospheric sciences, behavioural and neural sciences, biological and critical systems, materials research and mechanical and structural systems, along with many other application areas. Much of the research will continue on KFS, a 615 teraflop HP Proliant SL250-based supercomputer with 264 nodes, where each node contains two Intel Sandy Bridge processors, three Nvidia M2090 GPU accelerators, 32 GB of host memory, and a Mellanox InfiniBand FDR interconnection network. KFS has delivered sustained performance of more than a quarter of a petaflop in initial testing. The system occupies roughly 400 square feet, including the space for in-row cooling and service areas.

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