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New Supercomputer dramatically speeds research computations

Equal to 30 desktops

Minnesota State Mankato’s new Supercomputer, installed last week, dramatically speeds computations for faculty researchers. It is available for use in research projects by College of Science, Engineering and Technology faculty.

2007-02-02

Minnesota State Mankato’s new Supercomputer (High-Performance Computer), funded by the National Science Foundation, was installed late last month and is available for use in research projects by College of Science, Engineering & Technology faculty. A Web page with photos of the powerful new computer is at http://cset.mnsu.edu/cis/supercomputer/

The new Supercomputer has the power of 30 high-end desktop computers. Some details about the new machine:

• It has one master node and 29 worker nodes.
• Each node has 8GB of RAM, for a total of 240 GB
• Each node has two dual-core AMD Opteron chips, for a total of 4 logical processors. The worker nodes contain a total of 116 processors
• All of the nodes run the Linux operating system.

David Haglin, chair of the Computer & Information Sciences Department, says the new Supercomputer dramatically speeds computations for one of his research projects.

"To run one of my computations involving data privacy of census data on a high-end desktop machine would take between 80 and 90 days," Haglin says. "This Supercomputer performed that same computation in slightly less than 18 hours."

 College of Science, Engineering & Technology faculty members interested in using the Supercomputer for research should contact Patrick Tebbe, Rebecca Bates or Haglin.

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