This award will fund Athena, the 166-TF Cray XT4 at University of Tennessee?s National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS), NSF's third largest and most cost effective supercomputer. At just over one cent per core-hour to operate, it represents an unprecedented opportunity for researchers to perform science. Applications that have difficulty scaling elsewhere have been very successful on Athena due to its superior interconnect. In addition, the ability to co-allocate Athena with Kraken will benefit users of both machines. Long running, relatively small core count jobs (60 hour jobs up to 18,048 cores) can be run on Athena, leaving shorter, bigger core count jobs on the larger Kraken (24 hour jobs up to 99,072 cores), allowing users to benefit from the strengths of each platform. Athena has been enabling science successfully and reliably for the last two years, both in general production mode for the TeraGrid, and also in dedicated mode for climate and high energy physics groups. NICS proposes to continue operating Athena for 12 additional months.
Athena, the 166-TF Cray XT4 at University of Tennessee’s National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS), is NSF's third largest and most cost effective supercomputer. At just over one cent per core-hour to operate, it represented an unprecedented opportunity for researchers to perform science. Applications that have difficulty scaling elsewhere have been very successful on Athena due to its superior interconnect and memory bandwidth. In addition, co-allocating Athena with Kraken benefitted users of both machines. Long running, relatively small core count jobs (60 hour jobs up to 18,048 cores) were run on Athena, leaving shorter, bigger core count jobs on the larger Kraken (24 hour jobs up to 112,896 cores), allowing users to benefit from the strengths of each platform. Under this award, Athena enabled science successfully and reliably for the TeraGrid from July 2010 to June 2011. In this time, Athena delivered over 144 million hours to scientists in 308,446 jobs, with over 99% uptime and 93% utilization. Over US 20 institutions used time on this machine, as allocated by the TeraGrid Resource Allocations Committee. This machine was used in classes at University of Tennessee-Knoxville, Brown University and Truman State University. NICS also participated in the Virtual School for Computational Science and Engineering, the TeraGrid/DEISA Summer School in HPC, the USA Science and Engineering Festival, Tapia, the National Society of Black Engineers, ESPCoR, the TeraGrid 2010 and Supercomputing 2010 conferences.
