Lexington, KY – The University of Kentucky has finished installing its newest supercomputer, a $2.6 million Dell system that runs with the computing power of nearly 5,000 units, theoretically capable of 140 trillion mathematical calculations per second.
“We cannot move forward, we cannot be positioned to recruit and retain world-class faculty and researchers if we do not have this capacity and this capability,” UK President Eli Capilouto said at a Monday morning conference discussing the new system and the quarter-century of high level computing that proceeded it. “It leverages us, it strengthens us to get the next awards and to recruit that next crop of best and brightest students.”
In addition to the new computer, the university has been awarded a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to launch a software-defined networking infrastructure that will connect UK and its new supercomputer with the other universities around the commonwealth.
“With this grant we’re announcing today, we’re going to basically move into a whole new era of networking that will allow us to do things on the network with researchers that we’ve never been able to do in the past,” said Doyle Friskney, UK’s Chief Technology Officer. “(It will) Basically open up large pathways to allow super computers to get to whatever resources they need to be able to weave together a computational environment that meets that researchers requirements using resources not only available at the University of Kentucky, but at a lot of national centers.”
The grant for the network will allow the university’s researchers to shape the network itself to fit their needs, something that is new to the world of interconnectivity.
“This will allow us to transform the very nature of the network itself so that we actually now can program the network to customize it to our scientific applications to support our researchers in ways that we were not able to do before,” said James Griffioen, Ph.D, a professor of Computer Sciences and researcher.
The new supercomputer replaced the William N. Lipscomb Jr. High-Performance Supercomputing Cluster, a supercomputer named for a UK alumnus and Nobel Laureate, that was installed under a two-year lease in 2010. Like its predecessor and replacement, its annual lease rate was $1.3 million. While the computer announced Monday is 140 teraflops, capable of the 140 trillion mathematical calculations per second, the Lipscomb worked at a rate of 40 teraflops, a level lauded at the time as one of the top 10 systems in use at a public institution, 26 months ago.
The system the Lipscomb computer replaced was capable of a maximum of around 16 teraflops.
Like the ones that came before it, the new supercomputer is set to be replaced in two to three years as technology keeps evolving.