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Dear GSCIS Friends,

Today (Feb 13, 2014) NSU broke ground on the new $80 Million Research Facility.  Within this facility we will have NSU’s first Supercomputer which was obtained by the Graduate School of Computer and Information Sciences.

ground_break_ccr

In December 2013 we received a multimillion dollar IBM P6 Supercomputer which has been named “MEGALODON”. This machine was donated by Centaurus Energy in Houston, TX. The system was removed by IBM in Houston and IBM engineers are currently working with NSU.

Supercomputers play an important role in research by allowing researchers to create more accurate models of complex processes, simulate problems once thought impossible to solve, and analyze increasing amounts of data generated by experiments in weeks or months, rather than the years conventional computers require.

Researchers at NSU will use this Supercomputer to solve problems that they currently cannot address with our existing systems.  These problems include: Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Data Mining, Visualization, and Software Engineering.

This gift directly supports President Hanbury’s 2020 goal of raising $300 million in funded research. Researchers at NSU will use it to solve problems that they currently cannot address without using other universities’ computing resources, at substantial cost to NSU. This machine will also attract funding to support our research infrastructure and ongoing activities that will be in the CCR.

The machine cluster is a collection of 32 nodes.  Each pSeries 575 node has 16 P6 CPU’s with 256 GB RAM each.  Each CPU has 2 processor units that can run 2 threads each.  Each node has 256 GB real memory. It also has a DS 4800 Disk subsystem which is designed for data-intensive applications. The machine cluster is water-cooled using internal chilled plates and a rear cooling door on each rack.

The POWER6 is a dual-core processor. Each core is capable of two-way simultaneous multithreading (SMT). The POWER6 has approximately 790 million transistors. Each core has two integer units, two binary floating-point units, an AltiVec unit, and a novel decimal floating-point unit. POWER6 has hardware support for IEEE 754 decimal arithmetic and includes the first decimal floating-point unit integrated in silicon.

The software stack consists of: AIX, General Parallel File System (GPFS), C++, Fortran, IBM Parallel Environment Runtime (PE), Engineering and Scientific Subroutine Library (ESSL), Parallel Engineering and Scientific Subroutine Library (PESSL), and Tivoli Workload Scheduler LoadLeveler.

Eric S. Ackerman, Ph.D.
Dean and Associate Professor
Nova Southeastern University
Graduate School of Computer and Information Sciences

http://scis.nova.edu/megalodon.html

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