Ohio Supercomputer Center has procured a $4 million expansion pack for its IBM supercomputer.
The Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) has procured a $4 million expansion pack for its IBM supercomputer. The additional processing power, more than double the current capability, is sorely needed to boost state competitiveness, by providing the capability for additional research in the biosciences and other endeavors.
“By adding badly needed computing resources for academic and industry researchers, this expansion can further propel Ohio to the forefront of biosciences research and job creation,” said Stanley Ahalt, executive director of OSC, in a statement. “With critical supercomputing resources, Ohio researchers can increase the state’s share of national bioscience funding."
OSC noted that the schedule for running jobs on the supercomputer, an IBM Cluster 1350, reached full capacity within three months of the machine going operational in January 2008.
The upgrade, which costs $4 million, should be completed by this summer. An additional 600 nodes, with a total of 5,328 processing cores will be added to the system, bringing its computer capacity from 22 trillion floating point operations per second (teraflops) to 75 teraflops. The upgrade will also involve adding 300 terabytes of storage.
In the field of biosciences, the Nationwide Children’s Research Institute has already used the system to look at ways to improve identification of cancer through virtual microscopy, and the Ohio State University Medical Center’s Department of Biomedical Informatics uses the system for cancer research, as part of the Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid initiative.
