"Accelerated" High-Performance Computing Resources

• HokieSpeed - GPU Accelerated Supercomputer: Curently in the design phase, slated for construction and release in mid-late 2011.
• GPU - Accelerated Desktop Supercomputers: 10 GPU-accelerated desktops, each driven by one or more of the following GPUs: AMD HD 3870, HD 4870 and HD5870 and NVIDIA 8800 GTS, 9800 GX2, Tesla D870 and GTX 280.
• Fire Cluster: A GPU-accelerated cluster with 8+1 nodes, where each node consists of 2.3-GHz dual oct-core AMD Magny Cour CPUs, 4 nodes with 2 NVIDIA TESLA c2050 GPUs and 4 with 2 NVIDIA TESLA c1060.
• Low Power GPU Systems: A set of 3 machines designed to operate on a low power budget with integrated or low power discrete GPUs for energy and efficiency testing. Systems with AMD Radeon 5450 GPUs, NVIDIA ION GPUs, and ION2 GPUs are all represented.
• RidgeRunner Cluster: 24-node Linux cluster made up of Sony PlayStation 3 game consoles. Total memory: 6 GB. Total Storage: 960 GB. Network: Gigabit Ethernet

Other "Non-Accelerated" High-Performance Computing Resources

• System G Cluster: A 325-node Apple Mac Pro cluster, where each node contains two quad-core 2.8-GHz Intel Xeon processors and 8 GB of memory and is interconnected with Mellanox QDR high-speed interconnect. Of particular note is that System G contains over 11,000 power and thermal sensors and advanced system software.
• ICE Cluster: A 9-node Linux cluster, where each node consists of two dual-core 2.6-GHz AMD Opteron 2218 processors, 4 GB of memory, and 250 GB of storage. Each node is connected via 10-Gigabit Ethernet and Myri-10G.
• System X Cluster: Virginia Tech's System X ("System Ten"), was initially ranked 3rd on the 22nd TOP500 List released November 16, 2003. System X is an 1100-node cluster of Apple PowerMac G5 servers, consisting of 2200 2.3-GHz IBM PowerPC 970 CPUs (64-bit architecture), 4.4 TB of main memory, and 176 TB of secondary storage. System X uses two interconnection fabrics, InfiniBand and Gigabit Ethernet (GigE). The InfiniBand fabric includes Mellanox Couger InfiniBand 4x HCAs, 4 SilverStorm Technologies 9120 core switches, and 64 SilverStorm leaf switches. The GigE fabric (used for NFS, system management, and job startup) is composed of six Cisco 4506s in a mesh topology. For two years running, System X was the fastest academic supercomputer in the U.S., according to the Top500 List at http://www.top500.org/. Details can be found at http://www.eng.vt.edu/tcf/index.html. This facility is used for research in applied computational science as well as computer science.
• Anantham Cluster: A 200-node (400-processor) Linux cluster with 200 GB of memory and 1.2 TB of disk space. The Anantham's Myrinet fabric is composed of LANai 9 hardware using a range of copper and fiber cabling with two 96-port Myricom switches connected to act as a single backplane.
• The above clusters along with numerous other workstations and other small experimental clusters are already networked to the National LambdaRail (NLR), as noted below.

Virginia Tech Campus Information Technology

The Computing Center provides information processing services for the campus, as well as administering computer labs for student use. The Computing Center houses servers - from PC to mainframe - for various tasks. These servers include systems by IBM, DEC, Sun, and SGI. Also available for research use are varied systems including a Sun Enterprise 6500 with 17 processors. IBM has donated a substantial amount of IBM hardware for research use at Virginia Tech, including a Digital Linear Tape based hierarchical storage facility. Virginia Tech boasts a rich network infrastructure. The campus backbone serves over 15,000 desktops in campus building LANs.

Virginia Tech plays a key role in Network Virginia (http://www.networkvirginia.net/), a mature statewide network. This provides high-bandwidth connectivity to Virginia Tech's geographically scattered campus. It is able to support multimedia-intense activities such as video teleconferencing.

Virginia Tech also manages the Virginia gigaPOP providing access for Research I institutions throughout the mid-Atlantic region to next generation networks including Internet2's Project Abilene Network, the Department of Energy's ESnet, and the National Science Foundation's vBNS network. Campus network users all have access to these resources currently. Virginia Tech is a charter member of the Internet2 (http://www.internet2.edu) initiative and provided leadership in the MidAtlantic Crossroads (MAX) initiative (see http://www.networkvirginia.net/MAX). Current focus is on the National LambdaRail (NLR, http://www.nationallambdarail.org/).

Virginia Tech is also an active participant in wireless networking technologies. Its Center for Wireless Telecommunications (http://www.cwt.vt.edu) obtained licenses to operate in the 1150-MHz wireless spectrum in the Greater Roanoke, Danville, Martinsville and Kingsport-Johnson City market areas, as part of the FCC's first Local Multipoint Distribution Service (LMDS) auction. This allows Virginia Tech to forge ahead in its LMDS research efforts (http://www.cwt.vt.edu/lmdf/).