Cherry Creek overflows with HPC goodness at Uni of Nevada

Switched in from Oregon

The University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has signed a deal giving it access to a year-old TOP500 and Green500 supercomputer, the Intel-built Cherry Creek which has arrived at the city's Switch Supernap.

In a partnership with Switch, the university says it will be offering the machine for private sector research as well as its own work on medical, genomics, bioinformatics and climate research, as well as molecular modelling and data analytics.

The university says Cherry Creek will give it a sevenfold boost in processing power. At launch in 2013, the machine sat at position 400 on the Top500 list, but with a considerably better green-tech ranking that landed it at position 41 on the Green500 rankings.

The 48 node cluster comprises 12 Supermicro FatTwin Servers with 48 x 2U half-width nodes. Each node runs two Intel Xeon E5-2697v2 and three Phi 7120P co-processors, with 128 GB of Micron DDR3 memory. The machine reports 198.8 Tflops Rpeak theoretical maximum performance and consumes a maximum 74 kW.

Originally hosted at Orgeon, Cherry Peak has now arrived at Switch. University staff are now handling scheduling, optimsation, maintenance and updates. Bright Computing, CoolIT, Supermicro and Micron Technology worked with Intel to develop the machine. ®