SCIENCE

Appro (http://www.appro.com) has announced the deployment of 324-node/100 Teraflops Appro quad-socket based cluster solution, named “Trestles” by the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego. This project was a result of a $2.8 million grant award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to build a new high performance computer to solving critical research science using advanced HPC technology.

The Trestles solution is an Appro 1U-1143H quad-socket server based on 8-core AMD Opteron 6100 series processors connected via a QDR InfiniBand fabric. Each of the 324 nodes has 64 GB of DDR3 memory and 120 GB of flash memory. The system is expected to enter operations later this year and remain in service for three years. Designed to increase productivity for a broad spectrum of researchers, Trestles will have 10,368 processor cores, a peak speed of 100 teraflop/s, and 38 terabytes of flash memory.  It will begin operations before the end of 2010 and remain in use for three years under the NSF award. The system will work with and span the deployments of SDSC’s recently deployed Dash system and its larger Gordon data-intensive system, to be deployed mid-2011. 

 “Trestles” is appropriately named because it will serve as a bridge between SDSC’s unique, data-intensive resources available to TeraGrid users now and into the future,” said Mike Norman, SDSC’s interim director. “The overarching goal of Trestles is to enable as much productive science as possible in this data-intensive era.”

Like Dash, Trestles will be available to users of the TeraGrid, the nation’s largest open-access scientific discovery infrastructure. 

 “TeraGrid user data show that scientific impact occurs across all allocation levels and that many well-known computational science usage models do not require large-scale jobs or huge allocations,” said Richard Moore, deputy director of SDSC and a co-PI on the project. However, a fair number of computational science approaches require resources with scheduling flexibility and rapid turnaround. “By focusing on core counts of 1,024 or less, Trestles is designed to serve a much larger number of users while simultaneously improving their productivity as measured by turnaround and the number of jobs completed,” said Allan Snavely, associate director of SDSC and also a co-PI for the new system. 

“SDSC is recognized as a national leader in creating and providing cyber-infrastructure for data-intensive research,” said Daniel Kim, CEO of Appro.  “SDSC is also dedicated to elevate the competitiveness of advanced technologies to accelerate supercomputer performance.  We welcome these opportunities to work with SDSC to provide cutting-edge, advanced supercomputing solutions.”