STONY BROOK, N.Y., September 12, 2006 — Stony Brook University announced today that it has acquired a new supercomputer which will aid faculty researchers and graduate students in processing complicated calculations at high speed, which will dramatically accelerate research computations. The supercomputer is a custom-built 3.2 teraFLOPS, 470-processor Linux Cluster, and will be located in Stony Brook’s Heavy Engineering Building. It will define a new era of computing on the Stony Brook campus.
“This supercomputer will be an invaluable resource for researchers,” said James Glimm, PhD. Chair of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics. “It is a remarkable and highly sophisticated tool, which will make the processing of intricate data more efficient and timely.”
The supercomputer has been named the Seawulf Cluster, an amalgam of the University mascot—the Seawolf—and the traditional name of “Beowulf” used for a Linux cluster computer. The cluster uses 3.4GHz Intel Pentium IV Xeon CPUs interconnected with Gigabit Ethernet. The data are stored on five IDE RAID storage systems, with a total of 20TB of high speed disk space.
The Seawulf Cluster (www.stonybrook.edu/seawulfcluster) will provide computational resources and expertise for basic scientific research conducted in an interdisciplinary fashion. It will be unveiled at a ceremony on Monday, September 25 at 3:00 PM in the Heavy Engineering Building, Room 154. Funded by the Office of the Provost Robert McGrath and the Office of the Vice President/Research Gail Habicht, the acquisition of the Seawulf Cluster is one of several coordinated steps Stony Brook has taken to enhance its strength in computational resources.
Last year, the University received a donation from IBM as part of the company’s nationwide initiative to foster collaborative research. The gift consisted of a pSeries supercomputer capable of nearly a trillion floating-point operations per second and advanced visualization hardware.
The most important of the planned future steps will be the acquisition of a major supercomputer, to be located at Brookhaven National Laboratory and managed jointly by Stony Brook and BNL. This major supercomputer will be 30 times more powerful than Seawulf, and is designed to attack the leading scientific problems of the nation, and for use as a regional and New York State facility. Also a new center for computational science is in the planning stage, with both of the steps to be announced formally shortly.
