"Universities today are looking for the fastest, most innovative and cost-efficient systems to help their intellectual communities translate the research they generate into viable information for the commercial market," said Doug Balog, vice president, IBM BladeCenter. "With the Cluster 1350 system based on the AMD Opteron LS20 IBM BladeCenter, students and faculty of Georgia Tech are gaining the processing power and system resources they need to make more accurate decisions in research and raise the profile of the Institute among the nation's most elite research facilities."

"Only the most technologically savvy universities are able to compete in the field of drug discovery and bioinformatics," said Mike Cassidy, president and CEO of the Georgia Research Alliance. "Georgia Tech's focus on top-of-the-line technology and research facilities and the attraction of Dr. Jeff Skolnick and other world-class scholars will raise its presence in this competitive market and attract some of the nation's brightest students to join our research team to advance medicines that will improve the well-being of people everywhere."

BellSouth worked closely with Georgia Tech and IBM to design a unique, reliable hosting environment to support the high power density supercomputing cluster.

"With our hosting background, we had the flexibility and experience to quickly create a one-of-a-kind solution that could support Georgia Tech, IBM and the supercomputing cluster that will power the groundbreaking research of Dr. Skolnick," said Bill Smith, BellSouth's Chief Technology Officer.

The new supercomputer, capable of a peak performance of more than 16 TeraFlops, consists of a cluster of 1,000 AMD Opteron processor-based LS20 nodes for IBM BladeCenter systems (total of 4,000 core processors) running Red Hat Linux 4 on the infrastructure nodes and Scientific Linux on the com
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Contact: David Terraso
d.terraso@gatech.edu
404-385-2966
Georgia Institute of Technology
8-Feb-2006