Anti-Hurricaine Grid Computing

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Hurricane research just got a little more competent. The Southeastern Universities Research Association has announced a partnership with IBM that will increase the Association’s processing power to 10 trillion calculations per second across a grid of three interlinked IBM p575 servers. The systems are currently installed at Louisiana State and Georgia State, with the third to be built at Texas A&M this fall.

Each p575 server is comprised of 32GB of memory and 16 IBM Power5+ processors running at 1.9 GHz. The systems feature the Globus.org grid software that will allow participating universities to work in a heterogeneous environment.

SURA is a research collective comprised of eight universities who focus their brain powers on similar issues. Hurricanes are, appropriately, their current interest. The data gathered from this concentration can be used to adapt storm surge models and increase the overall efficiency of Hurricane warnings.

Grid Computing Doubles Capability of Hurricane Research [InformationWeek]