Teraflop to the top: IU's new supercomputer can do 20 trillion operations per second.

• Author: Kaelble, Steve
• Position: AROUND INDIANA

A POWERFUL SUPERcomputer deserves an impressive name. Some of the most fearsome computing machines in the world go by such nicknames as Lightning, Thunder, Mach5, Intimidata, Red Storm, Blue Protein and, yes, Stella.

When Indiana University officially moved into the big leagues of supercomputing last month, its new machine needed a name, too. "We thought it was appropriate to call it Big Red," says Dr. Michael McRobbie, interim provost and vice president for academic affairs at IU Bloomington.

The $9 million Big Red project has vaulted IU into the upper echelons of university computing. Among academic machines, it's the nation's speediest, says McRobbie, and also has the most impressive storage capacity Overall, it's the 23rd-most-powerful supercomputer on earth, on the "Top 500 Supercomputer Sites" list amid such prestigious computer users as the Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories, NASA, the U.S. Department of Energy and similar high-end users around the world. IU has on occasion cracked the top 100, but most recently was ranked in the 300s.

IU's machine, an IBM e1350 BladeCenter Cluster, can hit the blazing-fast speed of 20 teraflops, says McRobbie. That's 20 trillion operations per second, "about a thousand times more powerful than a desktop PC," he says. It's also about 20 times more powerful than the IU supercomputer it replaces. "The point in having this kind of system is that researchers can do work in minutes that it would take days to do on a desktop machine."

Just about every area of science relies on super-fast computing these days, he says, from physics and climatology to the life sciences. Having such a powerful machine promises to help Indiana continue to build upon its life-science successes. Though the device is located in Bloomington, at IU's Wrubel Computing Center Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Facility, it can...