National Science Foundation Awards $7 Million to TACC for Remote Visualization and Data Analysis

By DE Editors

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a $7 million grant to the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)  at The University of Texas at Austin for a three-year project that will provide a new compute resource and a comprehensive suite of visualization and data analysis (VDA) services to the open science community.

The new compute resource, “Longhorn,” will enable the national and international science communities to interactively visualize and analyze datasets of near petabyte scale (a quadrillion bytes or 1,000 terabytes) for scientists to explore, gain insight, and develop new knowledge.

According to Kelly Gaither, principal investigator and director of data and information analysis at TACC, the sudden onset of the widespread adoption of high-performance computing (HPC) enabled by commodity clusters, and the scaling of systems to hundreds of teraflops and beyond made it urgent to ensure that this data deluge did not cause a bottleneck for visualization of very large datasets.

“The capabilities of VDA resources have not kept pace with the explosive rate of data production leading to a critical juncture in computational science,” Gaither says. “Interactive visualization,  data analysis, and timely data assimilation are necessary for exploring important and challenging problems throughout science, engineering, medicine,  national security, and safety, to name a few important areas.”

“Longhorn” system capabilities include:

• Total peak performance (CPUs): 20.7 teraflops
• Total peak performance (GPUs): 500 teraflops single precision floating point operations
• Total peak rendering performance: 154 billion triangles/sec
• Total memory: 13.5 terabytes
• Total disk: 210 terabyte global file system
• 256 Dell R610 and R710 servers each with two Intel Xeon 5500 processors
• 512 CPUs with 2,048 Intel Nehalem (2.53GHz) quad-core processors
• 128 NVIDIA Quadroplex 2200 S4 units each with four Quadro FX 5800 GPUs with 122,880 CUDA processor cores; 2,048 gigabytes (two terabytes) of distributed graphics RAM
 

“TACC and the NSF have demonstrated that it’s possible to make long-term strategic investments in HPC technology, even during a challenging economic period,” said John Mullen, vice president of Dell Education, State and Local Government. “Thanks to that investment,  Longhorn will allow scientists to tackle complex challenges with new advancements in CPU, GPU and networking technologies through an industry-standard HPC stack.”

The project will provide the framework for leading researchers to collaborate and analyze their terascale datasets while still offering low barriers to entry and usability. The grant will stimulate and support new VDA research and technology transfer throughout the scientific research community.

Longhorn and its related services will be running by Supercomputing 2009,  which takes place Nov. 14-20 in Portland, OR. The system is scheduled to enter full production on Jan. 4, 2010. The grant expires in July 2012.

For more information, visit TACC.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.