Georgia Tech receives $12M NSF Track 2 award for HPC

Hi - 

Georgia Tech announced a $12M NSF award to build an experimental, high
performance computing system, partnering with major industry players HP
and NVIDIA. See press release below. 

The goal of this award is to develop a smaller, more sustainable, yet
equally powerful alternative to the giant high-performance computing
systems currently in development, including IBM's Blue Waters. Georgia
Tech is known for its strength in the experimental design, development
and testing of future systems. And, as you know, supercomputing is going
to be the driver of the next-generation technology industry as it forms
the backbone for new discoveries in biomedicine, energy and materials
science. 

Please let me know if you have any questions or if you'd like to set up
an interview with project spokesperson(s).

Thanks,
Brendan

cohn&wolfe

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GEORGIA TECH TEAM SECURES NSF TRACK 2 AWARD TO DEVELOP FUTURE GENERATION
HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING SYSTEM

Public/Private Collaboration Aims Toward Exascale
With Smaller, Faster, Sustainable Machines

ATLANTA - October 21 2009 - The Georgia Institute of Technology today
announced its receipt of a five-year, $12 million Track 2 award from the
National Science Foundation's (NSF) Office of Cyberinfrastructure to
lead a partnership of academic, industry and government experts in the
development and deployment of an innovative and experimental
high-performance computing (HPC) system. The award provides for the
creation of two heterogeneous, HPC systems that will expand the range of
research projects that scientists and engineers can tackle, including
computational biology, combustion, materials science, and massive visual
analytics. The project brings together leading expertise and technology
resources from Georgia Tech's College of Computing, Oak Ridge National
Laboratory (ORNL), University of Tennessee, National Institute for
Computational Sciences, HP and NVIDIA. 

NSF's Track 2 program is an activity designed to fund the deployment and
operation of several leading-edge computing systems operating at or near
the petascale.  An underlying goal is to advance U.S. computing
capability in order to support computational scientists and engineers in
the pursuit of scientific discovery. The award announced today is the
part of the fourth round of awards in the Track 2 program. 

"Our goal is to develop and deploy a novel, next-generation system for
the computational science community that demonstrates unprecedented
performance on computational science and data-intensive applications,
while also addressing the new challenges of energy-efficiency," said
Jeffrey Vetter, joint professor of computational science and engineering
at Georgia Tech and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

"The user community is very excited about this strategy," Vetter
continued. For example, James Phillips, senior research programmer at
the University of Illinois who leads development of the widely-used NAMD
application, says "Our experiences with graphics processors over the
past two years have been very positive and we can't wait to explore the
new Fermi architecture; this new NSF resource will provide an ideal
platform for our large biomolecular simulations."

Georgia Tech's Vetter will lead the five-year project as principal
investigator. The project team is comprised of luminaries in the HPC
field, including a Gordon Bell Prize winner and previous recipients of
the NSF Track 2B award. Co-principal investigators on the project are
Prof. Jack Dongarra (University of Tennessee and ORNL), Prof. Karsten
Schwan (Georgia Tech), Prof. Richard Fujimoto (Georgia Tech), and Prof.
Thomas Schulthess (Swiss National Supercomputing Centre and ORNL). 

The platforms will be developed and deployed in two phases, with initial
system delivery planned for deployment in early 2010. This system's
innovations in performance and power will be achieved through
heterogeneous processing based on widely-available NVIDIA graphics
processing units (GPUs). As industry partners, HP and NVIDIA will be
providing the computational systems, platforms and processors needed to
develop the system. 

"Research institutions are looking for energy-efficient,
high-performance computing architectures that can speed time to
solution," said Ed Turkel, manager of business development in the
Scalable Computing and Infrastructure business unit at HP. "The
combination of HP's industry-standard HPC server technology with NVIDIA
processors delivers increased performance and faster application
development, accelerating higher education research projects."

The initial system will pair hundreds of HP high-performance Intel
processors with NVIDIA's new next-generation CUDA architecture,
codenamed Fermi, designed specifically for high-performance computing.
This project will be the first of the Track 2 awards to realize the vast
potential of GPUs for HPC. 

"Computational science is a key area driving the worldwide application
of GPUs for high-performance computing," said Bill Dally, chief
scientist at NVIDIA. "GPUs working in concert with CPUs is the
architecture of choice for future demanding applications."  

A critical component of the program is a focus on education, outreach
and training to expand the knowledge and understanding of HPC among a
broader audience. The Georgia Tech team will conduct workshops to
attract and train new users for the system, engage historically
underrepresented groups such as women and minorities, and educate future
generations on the vast potential of high-performance computing as a
career field. 

More information on the project and its resources is available at
http://keeneland.gatech.edu <http://keeneland.gatech.edu> .


About the Georgia Institute of Technology

The Georgia Institute of Technology is one of the nation's premier
research universities. Ranked seventh among U.S. News & World Report's
top public universities, Georgia Tech's more than 19,000 students are
enrolled in its Colleges of Architecture, Computing, Engineering,
Liberal Arts, Management and Sciences. Tech is among the nation's top
producers of women and African-American engineers. The Institute offers
research opportunities to both undergraduate and graduate students and
is home to more than 100 interdisciplinary units plus the Georgia Tech
Research Institute

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