In Memoriam: Lev Kofman
The inaugural John Stewart Bell Prize
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University of Toronto supercomputer among world's 20 fastest machines
System can process up to 360 trillion calculations per second and has 60,000 times more memory than a typical home computer
The IBM iDataPlex supercomputer at the University of Toronto
Canada’s fastest and most powerful supercomputer, located at the University of Toronto and built by IBM, has been ranked 16th on the top 500 list of the most powerful commercially available computer systems in the world. The top 500 list was announced today at the annual International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany.
“With a high performance computer that is among the top 20 on the planet, the University of Toronto has become one of the world’s premier computational research institutions,” says Professor Paul Young, vice-president, research at U of T. “The supercomputer will attract researchers from around the world, and will enable us to conduct research in a variety of disciplines that will have a direct and positive impact on society.”
Designed by IBM and SciNet, a consortium which includes the University of Toronto and affiliated research hospitals, the IBM System x iDataPlex is part of a supercomputer facility that pioneers an innovative hybrid design containing two systems that can work together or independently, connected to a massive five petabyte storage complex able to store the contents of more than one million DVDs – which would stack more than twice the height of the CN Tower. The iDataPlex server is specifically designed for data centers that require high performance, yet are constrained on physical space, power and cooling infrastructure.
With more compute power than existed on Earth at the end of 2001, the iDataPlex is capable of performing over 300 trillion calculations per second – more than 10 times faster than any other research system in Canada. “If you gave a calculator to every single man, woman and child in Canada and had them each do one calculation per second, it would take the entire country four months to do what this machine does every second,” says Chris Loken, chief technical officer at SciNet. It is the world’s fourth most powerful system built on a university campus, and the second most powerful university system outside the United States. The extraordinary speed of the iDataPlex comes from the 7,500 Intel® Xeon® Processor 5500 series 2.53 GHz processors inside. This model outperforms the previous generation Intel® Xeon® Processor 5400 series by over 2.25 times within a similar power configuration.