The National Center for Supercomputing Applications, which researches everything from the origins of the universe to the human genome, will link more than 1,450 Dell Inc. PowerEdge servers together to create a supercomputer with a peak of 17.7 teraflops (trillion floating point operations per second).
The cluster will rank as the third most powerful supercomputer in the world and will increase the centers total computing output to almost 24 teraflops, according to officials at Dell, in Round Rock, Texas.
The computer maker made the announcement Monday at the LinuxWorld show, in San Francisco.
The center, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, will use 1,280 two-way PowerEdge 1750 systems powered by Intel Corp.s 3.05GHz Xeon chips running Red Hat Inc.s Linux operating system and linked by Myricom Inc.s Myrinet 2000 interconnect technology.
There also will be 106 other PowerEdge servers providing I/O services and 120 TB of storage and another 64-node cluster for application testing and development. Dells OpenManage software will monitor the systems in the cluster, which will be managed by software from Platform Computing Inc.
The supercomputer is scheduled to be completed in the fall.