Monday 30 May 2011

The Argonne National Laboratory reaches for the sky with IBM

The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) at Argonne National Laboratory is operated by the Leadership Computing Facility Division as part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s effort to provide leadership-class computing resources to the scientific community. The Argonne National Laboratory’s mission is to accelerate major scientific discoveries and engineering breakthroughs for humanity, by designing and providing world-leading computing facilities in partnership with the computational science community.

Business need:
Scientists require significant compute power to run complex simulations, and want the ability to scale up their computational experiments almost limitlessly; the cloud computing model potentially holds great promise.

Solution:
Argonne created Magellan, based on 560 IBM® System x® iDataPlex® dx360 M3 compute nodes with Mellanox ConnectX InfiniBand networking, running three software stacks to test the viability of cloud computing for science.

Benefits:
Argonne can rapidly assign exactly the required computing resources to each project, scale them up as required during the project, then return the resources to Magellan on completion.

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The Argonne National Laboratory reaches for the sky with IBM