University of Tennessee will receive a supercomputer with a capacity of 1 petaflops

The University of Tennessee (University of Tennessee, UT) received a grant of $ 65 million from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for the construction and subsequent maintenance of the Cray XT4 supercomputer for 5 years.


A feature of this supercomputer assembled using the AMD Opteron Quad-Core is its high power, which is estimated at about 1 petaflop (PetaFLOPS, 1,000,000,000,000,000 floating-point operations per second).

The cost of the XT4 supercomputer hardware, as noted, is about $ 30 million. The remaining $ 35 million will be spent on servicing the entire system for 5 years of its use.

XT4 supercomputer will be used for a variety of tasks:
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* astrophysicists to study the process of evolution of galaxies and the study of black holes
* scientists engaged in research on Earth’s climate to predict hurricanes / tornadoes and climate change
* researchers studying the structure and evolution of the Earth
* biochemists, physicists in the study of materials and proteins, in order to search for drugs, etc.

During its term at UT, Cray XT4 will be hardware updated to meet the high computational requirements, which, as representatives of the project say, “will never be satisfied”.

Sources: Cray , UT