HPC in the Cloud: U of Florida Expands Research Facility w/ Rackable Systems

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December 19, 2005

U of Florida Expands Research Facility w/ Rackable Systems

Rackable Systems Inc. announced completion of a major deployment of servers and storage at the University of Florida's (UF) High-Performance Computing Center. UF chose Rackable Systems' award-winning, rack-mount Foundation Series servers and clustered file system storage solutions for their leading performance levels, high density, exceptional thermal management and low power consumption.

Faced with data center space constraints and skyrocketing power bills, the University of Florida turned to Rackable Systems. To take full advantage of the thermal and space efficiencies of the Foundation Series platform, UF not only purchased new servers, but also replaced its existing single-core servers from a legacy vendor to expand the size of the cluster to 198 nodes featuring 800 processing cores. Rackable Systems' award-winning clustered file system solution was also deployed to provide 43TB of Fibre Channel storage for the facility.

Leveraging Rackable Systems' half-depth, highly dense, rack-mount servers powered by dual-core AMD Opteron processors, UF was able to triple its compute power in half the space occupied by its previous cluster. By deploying DC-powered nodes, UF also achieved significant savings in power and cooling while greatly enhancing overall reliability.

"As one of the nation's leading research institutions, our distributed-memory cluster must run the most demanding and computationally intensive scientific and engineering applications available while maintaining a high level of performance and reliability," said Charles Taylor, senior HPC systems engineer at the University of Florida. "Rackable Systems provided a complete package of clustered servers and storage that tripled our computational capacity while reducing our power and cooling costs -- all in less than half the space of our previous cluster."

The university also deployed Rackable Systems servers at its Tier-2 Center, a member of a global Grid computing infrastructure supporting the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment and other computationally intensive scientific applications.

"Rackable Systems' efficient, DC-powered servers and well-designed clusters allowed us to greatly increase our processing capability while reducing operational costs," said Jorge Luis Rodriguez, lead scientist for the University of Florida's CMS Tier-2 Center.

"World-class HPC research facilities like the University of Florida are increasingly choosing Rackable Systems servers and storage for their data centers," said Tom Barton, president and CEO of Rackable Systems. "As the need for maximum compute performance and storage capacity continues to rise, organizations require solutions that are more efficiently powered, cooled and maintained. We look forward to working closely with UF to provide the industry's most advanced data center solutions for their computing needs."

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