TACC secures $9 million for new Lonestar system

AUSTIN, Texas — The National Science Foundation (NSF), The University of Texas at Austin, and multiple partners have committed $9 million to the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) to acquire a new Lonestar system that is expected to support more than 1,000 research projects in science and engineering over three years. William Powers Jr., president of The University of Texas at Austin, said, "We thank the National Science Foundation for supporting UT's high-performance computing (HPC) system, enabling us and the national research community to conduct transformational science. As we did with the Ranger supercomputer, we want to make Lonestar a showcase system for researchers in Texas and throughout the world." TACC, in partnership with Dell, Intel, Mellanox Technologies and DataDirect Networks, will deploy an HPC system designed for achieving excellent performance on the workload of applications running on the NSF TeraGrid. The new Lonestar system will replace the current Lonestar, which has served as one of the most productive platforms in the TeraGrid for more almost four years, and will offer greater capabilities over the current system, including: The computational building blocks of the system will be a total of 1,888 Dell M610 PowerEdge blade servers, each with two six-core Intel Xeon 5600 "Westmere" processors. This will provide nearly 200 million CPU hours per year. DataDirect Networks will provide the high-speed disk storage and a Mellanox 40Gb/s InfiniBand network will integrate all of these components to enable tremendous performance on a wide range of applications.