Getting ready for the Stampede at Texas Advanced Computing Center

It wasn’t exactly a stampede to get to the ballroom for yesterday’s post lunch talk (more of a gentle coffee-fuelled drift) but there was certainly a Stampede when we got there. James Gutowski of Dell was there to enthusiastically present the new system that the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) will be deploying as part of the National Science Foundation's (NSF) "eXtreme Digital" (XD) program.

Named Stampede (you may have guessed), the new system will provide comprehensive computing and visualization capabilities for the open science community, helping  scientists to address challenging scientific and engineering problems. NSF is providing $27.5 million upfront and Stampede is expected to be up and running in January 2013. The system will replace Ranger (TACC) and Kraken (NICS).

Dell and TACC has gone for Linux/x86 and MIC processors (Many Integrated Core), having also assessed GPU, with MIC representing easier porting and more flexible programming options. Stampede is expected to have a peak performance of 10 PF with 14PB disk space, 250 TB RAM, 56 Gb FDR Infiniband interconnect and a substantial 200 racks of computer hardware. The base cluster is more than 6000 nodes and 100,000 cores but with a total concurrency of 500,000 cores.

January 2013 is racing around pretty fast, so the new data centre at TACC broke ground in February 2012 and the constructors are rolling in the racks as we speak. Find out more in HPCwire.