University Of Minnesota Purchases New Supercomputer

The University of Minnesota has announced that it is getting a new supercomputer at its institute for Advanced Computational Research. The new supercomputer is based on the SGI Altix UV 100 supercomputer and was purchase with funds from a NIH grant. The machine is being installed and undergoing acceptance testing during October and November with the machine being ready for end users in November.

The new system is being called Koronis and has shared memory system, ultrafast disk storage, and high-end visualization capabilities. Koronis features 1152 cores and the shared memory architecture can access all 3.1TB of memory directly.

The supercomputer will have attached high-performance workstations for visualization to handle biomed data and more. The university states that since the machine was purchased with NIH grant money only those working on projects funded by NIH can use the machine.