Georgia State is building a diverse and powerful supercomputing center to support a growing body of academic and scientific research. In September 2006 three researchers began working with a new IBM System p5 575 with Power5+ processors running AIX 5.3 -- acquired as part of the IBM-SURA regional partnership. Those three users became a dozen in January 2007 and now include more than 40 faculty from many disciplines as well as from other SURA sites such as Virginia Commonwealth University, Louisiana State University and University of Delaware.

"We're experiencing increasing demand for supercomputer resources," said Art Vandenberg, director of the university's supercomputing center. "Our strategy is to build a center that supports a wide variety of disciplines. So, we're adding the Cluster 1350 to support research that requires commodity level, Linux computing."

The new IBM System Cluster 1350 will help meet this increasing demand. As researchers gain access to more capacity and capability, they naturally are expanding their goals, driving demand. Researchers in chemistry, biology, molecular dynamics, computer science, climate modeling and political science will be among the new machine's first users. The Cluster 1350 will be added to Georgia State's high-end IBM System p5 575 supercomputer to offer scientists a range of in-house computing capabilities.

The 320 Intel® Xeon® Quad-Core processors that make up Georgia State's new Cluster 1350 will also be shared by SURA -- a group of 60 schools that shares supercomputing resources via a grid setup known as SURAgrid. The university's Cluster 1350 configuration runs at approximately three teraflops, or three billion calculations per second.

"Georgia State University has been a long term contributor to the SURAgrid initiative and we are extremely pleased that SURA has been able to assist Georgia State and other SURAgrid participants by providing access to specially discounted hardware and services through our partnership with IBM," said Gary Crane, SURA Director of IT Initiatives.-IBM