New cluster with 3280 cores will arrive soon.

With the purchase of a new Linux-cluster the University of Groningen puts its third computer in the top 500 list of the fastest computers in the world. The cluster will be used by scientist from various disciplines and will be placed at the CIT. The cluster is expected to become operational before the end of 2009.

The speed of the new cluster is comparible with the IBM blueGene and consists of 3280 AMD cores which are combined in small groups to get the optimal performance. There will be 236 groups of 12 cores, 16 of 24 cores and one with 64 cores. This allows the efficient use of the cluster, for various programming models. The complete machine has a performance af 30 Terraflops (30.000.000.000.000 operations per second. The total internal memory of the machine is 8 TByte and it has 132 TByte of diskstorage. All the parts of the machine are connected through a very fast InfiniBand network, capable of 20 Gb/s.