UT Launches Lonestar 4, Super Computer

The Texas Advanced Computing Center has announced the unveiling of the Lonestar 4, UT's newest super computer. The $12 million machine replaces its old version, which was one of the most productive platforms of the NSF TeraGrid network. "With Lonestar 4, we're able to do 3-D runs now in much less time, and we can compare results between 2-D and 3-D to see how much 3-D effects matter," said Clint Dawson, head of the Computational Hydraulics Group. "It's important for two reasons — evacuation as storms approach land and for studying new hurricane protection systems." The computer has 302 teraflops peak performance, 44.3 terabytes total memory, 1.2 petabytes raw disk and runs on 1,888 Dell M610 PowerEdge blade servers, each with two six-core Intel Xeon 5600 "Westmere" processors. DataDirect Networks provides the high-speed disk storage and a Mellanox 40Gb/s InfiniBand network integrates the components to enable very high-performance computing on a wide range of applications. Lonestar 4 will provide almost 200 million processor core hours per year to the national scientific community. Read more at utexas.edu.