Lonestar, the Cray/Dell Linux cluster supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin), has been upgraded with 128 new, more powerful nodes, for a total of 428 nodes (856 processors), 892 GB of aggregate memory, and 43.6 TB of disk. Already one of the most powerful HPC clusters in academia, Lonestar will deliver a new peak performance of 5.3 Teraflops. TACC integrated 128 Dell 1750 nodes and Myrinet 2000 interconnect hardware from Myricom, Inc. Each Dell 1750 has 2 Intel 3.2 GHz Xeon processors, 2 GB of memory, and 36 GB of local disk. Bioinformatics Research "The bioinformatics codes we have developed using Longhorn and the pre-enhanced Lonestar machines have enabled us to do comparative studies on pairs of completely sequenced genomes more rapidly than ever before. Biologists now want us to compare three or more genomes at once, a much harder problem. The increased speed and memory of the 128 new nodes on Lonestar will be significant for us as we attempt these harder problems," says Daniel P. Miranker of the UT Austin Computer Sciences Department, whose research concerns new data structures for bioinformatics. “The additional 128 nodes increase Lonestar’s computing capacity by over 40 percent. They will allow researchers in numerous disciplines to run larger, more complicated problems simultaneously, improving the overall throughput of computational science on the system,” says Tommy Minyard, Manager of the High Performance Computing group at TACC. Computational scientists in a vast array of fields including astronomy, engineering, fluid dynamics, molecular biology, and physics will use the upgraded Lonestar machine to find new stars, design faster and safer planes and ships, search the molecular causes of disease, and uncover the fundamental structure of the universe. TACC plans to further expand Lonestar to over 1000 processors by the end of the summer. The computer cycles are currently allocated directly to UT Austin researchers, who may apply for allocations of time on Lonestar via the TACC User Portal. Lonestar will also become available to researchers at other institutions when TACC becomes a part of the National Science Foundation TeraGrid in October 2004. About Texas Advanced Computing Center The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) is one of the leading academic advanced computing centers in the nation. TACC’s mission is to enhance the capabilities of researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and its partners through the application of advanced computing resources and expertise. TACC provides advanced computing resources and services to enable computationally-intensive research and conducts research and development activities to develop new computing techniques and technologies. More information on TACC is available at www.tacc.utexas.edu.