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GCN Home > 10/06/04 web stories

Pittsburgh supercomputer, funded by NSF, to be open to researchers

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

The Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center has bought a supercomputer from Cray Inc. of Seattle using a $9.7 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

Cray’s supercomputer will use 2,000 AMD Opteron processors and be capable of a peak performance of 10 trillion floating-point operations per second, according to the company.

The computer will not be dedicated to any one task but rather be open to the scientific community for a wide range of duties, said Peter Freeman, head of NSF’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering directorate.

“This is part of our overall strategy to provide the greatest possible capabilities in computation to the open science community,” Freeman said, adding that the agency wants to make as many different kinds of supercomputers available to the scientific community as possible, in order to address the widest possible range of problems.

The computer will be based on Cray’s Red Storm architecture, which the company developed as part of a $93 million contract awarded by Sandia National Laboratories in 2002.

The supercomputer will be integrated into TeraGrid, NSF’s distributed computing infrastructure, to make it better available to researchers.



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