CTC Dell Windows 2000 Cluster Among Top 500 Fastest Computers in the World

Business Wire, Nov 16, 2001

Business & Technology Editors

DENVER--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 16, 2001

The Cornell Theory Center (CTC) announced today that the most recent addition to its production computing systems, a 256-processor Dell PowerEdge cluster operating Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server, is ranked as one of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world. The Dell system achieved 120.67 gigaflops over 252 1Ghz Intel processors running the Linpack benchmark.

"It's outstanding that an enterprise-class supercomputing system costing well under one million dollars achieved a TOP500 ranking," said CTC chief technical officer, David Lifka. "Dell provides us with a complete cluster solution. And we can get our users up and running within days of hardware delivery."

CTC's newest 256-processor system ranked 320 on the TOP500 list. It consists of 128 dual-processor Dell PowerEdge 1550 servers with 1 Ghz Intel Pentium III processors, 2 GB Ram/Node, and 27 GB Disk/Node (RAID 0). System interconnects are Emulex cLAN (100 MB/sec) and Ethernet (100 Mb/sec). Following the Top 500 benchmark runs, the cluster was put into service for two of CTC's most challenging applications - computational materials and structural biology/genomics.

In addition to these research applications, CTC's Windows clusters are used in a variety of projects ranging from datamining to black hole physics. "Our Windows clusters are powerful, cost-effective and easy to use, making them ideally suited for many of the computationally intensive problems facing the financial services industry," said Tom Coleman, CTC director and computer science professor. CTC has a strong program in computational finance, headquartered at CTC-Manhattan.

"CTC's 24x7 production systems demonstrate that midrange to high-end systems running Windows can meet the challenges of high performance computing while extending the reach of HPC to all sizes of businesses and educational institutions," said George Spix, technical officer with the Microsoft Enterprise Server Platforms Team.

"At Merrill Lynch, we're using cLAN clustered Dell PowerEdge servers running Windows 2000 in high volume/high availability OLTP applications," explained First Vice President, David Yeger. "With today's technology, affordable HPC systems can be effectively deployed for line of business applications. They are easily built from high volume, industry standard components."

When CTC demonstrated to KLA-Tencor Corporation that Windows 2000 HPC clusters could be operated with a smaller systems staff and provide the same performance as proprietary systems, they opted for a Dell solution. "As a leader in the rapid-paced semiconductor industry, it's critical that we keep our software engineering development cycles on track, explained Bill Braymer, Senior Software Development Manager. "Thanks to CTC, Dell and Windows 2000, we've been able to install and operate high performance cluster systems at a fraction of the cost of proprietary servers and with the kind of scale out capabilities we need to meet demanding production requirements."

The ability to add servers "by the slice" is a real advantage to companies and universities that need to grow their systems quickly in order to meet accelerated product development schedules, to accommodate additional users, or to address more challenging scientific or business intelligence applications. "Scale out on Dell PowerEdge servers means outstanding reliability and manageability," added Randy Groves, vice president and general manager of Dell's Enterprise Systems Group. "Our customers realize that high-quality, consistent components are critical to the success of large-scale systems. Dell is an excellent choice for the demanding requirements of the fastest computers in the world."

The 18th TOP500 List was released at SC2001, the international conference on high-performance computing and networking. The list, http://www.top500.org, is compiled by the University of Manheim, Germany, and the University of Tennessee. The TOP500 have been announced twice a year since June 1993 with the help of high-performance computer experts, computational scientists, manufacturers, and the Internet community in general. While the TOP500 represents a competitive challenge, it is also a compilation of information identifying a variety of approaches to advanced computing technologies and is intended to foster communication and collaboration within the community.

CTC is a high-performance computing and interdisciplinary computational research center located at Cornell University. CTC receives funding from Cornell University, New York State, a number of federal agencies, and Corporate Program members. For further information please refer to the following URLs.

CTC:

http://www.tc.cornell.edu/

Dell Enterprise Systems:

http://www.dell.com/us/en/esg/topics/segtopic_server_storage.htm

Microsoft High Performance Computing:

http://www.microsoft.com/WINDOWS2000/hpc/