Supercomputing

Ohio Supercomputer Center Reduces State Industrial Computing Fee to $1

Ohio industrial clients will now save money when they compute at the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC). Effective April 1, 2006, OSC’s business clients can use some of the most advanced high performance computing (HPC) resources for $1 per CPU hour.

When computing, OSC’s industrial clients typically accrue processing charges. The new rate gives industrial clients the same unlimited access to OSC’s state-of-the-art hardware -- the Cray X1, Intel Pentium 4 Xeon Cluster, and Intel Itanium 2 Cluster -- for less.

OSC Purchases Intel Pentium 4 Cluster to Update Systems

OSC is updating its hardware with an Intel Pentium 4 (P4) cluster to be installed later this month. Replacing the AMD Athlon cluster, the P4 doubles the current system’s power with a sizable increase in speed.

With a theoretical peak of 2,457 gigaflops, the P4 cluster contains 256 dual-processor Pentium IV Xeon systems with four gigabytes of memory per node and 20 terabytes of aggregate disk space. It will be connected via a gigabit Ethernet and use Voltair InfiniBand 4x HCA, and a Voltair ISR 9600 InfiniBand switch router for high-speed interconnect.

National Technology Agencies Host Joint Conference in Columbus

Columbus is set to host a technology conference that for the first time will bring together five nationally recognized technology institutions that play a major role in the development and distribution of information technology to the education and research communities nationwide.

The conference is a national event that draws participants from across the country in order to identify and discuss the challenges of and solutions to problems associated with networking technology and content delivery. It takes place April 14-16 at the OSU Fawcett Center in Columbus.

OSC Leads OpenFPGA Consortium

The Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) is leading an international effort to promote the use of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) in high-level and enterprise applications. The OpenFPGA consortium will develop and share critical information, technologies and best practices for using its applications.

OSC announced this project at the Manchester Reconfigurable Computing Conference earlier this year. The conference united developers and hardware manufacturers with academic, government and commercial organizations to advance the use of FPGA technology in high-level applications.

OSC Requests Proposals for Second Phase of Cluster Ohio Project

To promote parallel computing among Ohio faculty, OSC (Ohio Supercomputer Center) is soliciting a second round of faculty research proposals. OSC will distribute Itanium (64-bit) systems to winning participants.

"OSC wants to create an environment for faculty members who are willing to port or develop software for parallel systems. To do this, OSC will provide a number of cluster systems to awardees," said Leslie Southern, Interim HPC Director. "We are looking for faculty proposals on software development for clusters of Itanium-based computer systems."

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