RENO, Nev., Nov. 14 — “HAWK,” the largest and most powerful computer in the Department of Defense (DoD), has achieved new heights of application scalability for a DoD system by running a single application across 9,000 processor cores. More significantly, the feat was achieved only a few weeks after the system was delivered.
An SGI Altix 4700 system from SGI, HAWK was successfully deployed ahead of schedule at the Aeronautical Systems Center Major Shared Resource Center (ASC MSRC) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. The supercomputer is powered by 9,216 Intel Itanium 2 processor cores and features 20TB of globally addressable memory and 440TB of usable disk space. The application-scaling breakthrough was achieved using advanced software codes that study the characteristics of turbulence. Dr. George Vahala, professor of physics at The College of William and Mary, ran a combination of Lattice Boltzmann and quantum turbulence codes on HAWK over a period of several weeks. A number of Vahala’s runs utilized all available 9,000 cores.
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