One of the University’s supercomputers, SuperMIC, ranked number 65 out of 500 machines worldwide.
SuperMIC is used in various University research projects, including assistant professor of biological sciences and Center for Computation and Technology faculty member Michal Brylinski’s research into prescription antibiotic simulations.
Also ranking in the top 100 are Indiana University, Purdue University, IBM Development Engineering and the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The list, available at top500.org, was composed using the LINPACK Benchmark. According to the website, this benchmark evaluates a machine’s performance by providing a dense system of linear equations to solve.
One solution cannot reflect the overall performance of a machine, according to the website, but because the problem provided is “regular,” it achieves a high performance, and therefore those numbers will reflect peak performance.
SuperMIC, a heterogeneous, high-performance computing cluster was added to the University’s family of supercomputers about 9 months ago due to a $3.92 million grant from the National Science Foundation.
Unlike some other top supercomputers, SuperMIC performs with Intel Xeon Phi and NVIDIA Kepler K20X graphics processing unit accelerators. SuperMIC was manufactured by Dell and runs operating system Redhat Enterprise Linux 6.4.
Last October, CCT deputy director Honggao Liu told The Daily Reveille he believes the cluster may be used to train future generations of scientists.