News

Rice University's largest computer system up and running

By Katherine Manuel

The Cray XD1 Cluster with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) Opteron processors was acquired with a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation and additional funds from AMD.  The Computer Science Department, the Computer and Information Technology Institute (CITI), and 34 individual faculty and staff members engaged in the two year project to bring the large scale computing resource to Rice.  On Friday morning, leaders of the Rice research community gathered with Dr. Hector de J. Ruiz, Charman of the Board, Chief Executive Officer and President of AMD Inc, and Peter J. Ungaro, Chief Executive Officer and President of Cray Inc, for an official ribbon-cutting ceremony to celebrate the supercomputer’s arrival. 

 Supercomputer Released to Rice Users

From Left to Right: Peter J. Ungaro, Chief Executive Officer and President of Cray Inc; Kathleen Matthews, Dean of Natural Sciences; Dr. Hector de J. Ruiz, Charman of the Board, Chief Executive Officer and President of AMD Inc; Jan Odegard, Executive Director of CITI; University Provost Dr. Eugene Levy; Sallie Keller-McNulty, Dean of Engineering; Kamran Kahn, Vice Provost for Information Technology

University Provost Dr. Eugene Levy reinforced the theme that computation is critical in every aspect of academic life.  Levy thanked everyone involved in bringing the project to fruition, including the leaders from Rice, Cray, and AMD, and he also gave special recognition to Dr. Ruiz and AMD for providing additional funding at a critical moment.

Dr. Ruiz, who is a Rice alumnus and a self proclaimed “fanatic of supercomputing,” spoke on the impact of computing not only in educational settings but across society.  Computer systems, claimed Ruiz, have the ability to solve social issues if properly applied.  In line with this belief, AMD announced in 2004 its 50x15 Initiative, a commitment to empower 50% of the world’s population with basic Internet access by the year 2015.   

Mr. Ungaro spoke on Cray’s mission to provide the “tools for scientists and engineers to make the next breakthroughs” and “solve problems that couldn’t be solved before in a shortened time period.”  Rice’s Cray XD1 cluster will be one of the largest XD1 systems in the world, Ungaro said.  Dr. Levy, Dr. Ruiz and Mr. Ungaro then joined Dr. Odegard and cut the ribbon, digitally represented on an overhead screen, with the click of a button, releasing the computer to the users at Rice.

Allison Heath, a doctoral student in Computer Science, had an early preview of the machine’s capability.  “I've been utilizing the new Cray XD1 to analyze protein folding simulations,” Heath said.   “The XD1 has slashed runtimes from days to hours.  I can complete my research sooner, giving me time to address new problems.”

The Cray XD1(TM) supercomputer consists of 28 fully populated XD1 chassis interconnected with Cray RapidArray. The system has a total of 336 Dual-Core AMD Opteron(TM) processors (672 cores), 1.4 TeraBytes of RAM, 12 TeraBytes of local storage, 6 TeraBytes of shared scratch mounted as a Luster file system, and 10 TeraBytes of NFS mounted file system for user files.

Kamran Kahn, Vice Provost for Information Technology; Sallie Keller-McNulty, Dean of Engineering; and Kathleen Matthews, Dean of Natural Sciences were also present at the ceremony.

For more on the Cray XD1 Cluster, please see the following stories:

http://cohesion.rice.edu//engineering/computerscience/news.cfm?doc_id=7739

http://investors.cray.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=98390&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=743467&highlight