Our goal with System X was to lower the barriers of access for a computational resource of this size, Srinidhi Varadarajan, assistant professor of computer science and director of the facility, said. Researchers, who have funding for computational time, can take advantage of an aggressive rate structure for additional hours on System X. With more than 12.25 teraflops of Sustained Linpack performance, System X is the second largest academic computing resource in the world. After a two-month friendly-user period, System X is now available to the wider high performance computer-user community, Calvin Ribbens, associate professor of computer science in Virginia Techs College of Engineering and deputy director of the facility, said. Allocation requests will be judged on scientific merit by a committee of faculty members. Internally-funded allocations will be available to Virginia Tech researchers doing exploratory research. Researchers will be asked to submit proposals at three levels, ranging from less than 10,000 to more than 100,000 cpu-hours, Ribbens said.