NCSA Fires Up CPU/GPU Supercomputer

By Matthew Dublin

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications has announced the rollout of its Forge supercomputer — a 153 teraflop system that uses CPUs and and GPUs.

The majority of compute time on Forge will be offered through the National Science Foundation's Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, or XSEDE program, a nationwide partnership of 20 institutions. XSEDE is led by the NCSA and provides resources, including services, tools, and technical support to the research user community. Whatever time is left on Forge will be allocated to the NCSA's Private Sector Program, an initiative that joins commercial businesses with NCSA research staff, as well as to faculty, staff, and students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Forge is comprised of 18 Dell PowerEdge C6145s that contain 36 nodes of dual-socket/eight-core AMD processors, with M2070 NVIDIA Fermi GPU units housed in Dell's C410x PCI expansion enclosures. There are eight Fermi units for each node, for a total of 288, and each NVIDIA M2070 provides more than 500 gigaflops of double-precision performance and 6GB of GDDR5 memory. A QDR InfiniBand interconnect fabric will interconnect the nodes; 700 terabytes of GPFS filesystem space will be provided by two Data Direct Networks SFA 10000 units. The I/O bandwidth of the system is expected to exceed 16GB/sec.