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TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 3
SYSTEM X: BUILDING THE THIRD FASTEST SUPERCOMPUTER
Srinidhi Varadarajan
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The idea of System X was conceived in March 2003 and designed in
July of that year. By October 2003, it had achieved a sustained
performance of 10.28 Teraflops (a trillion bytes of information),
making it the third fastest supercomputer in the world today. Based
on an Apple G5 platform, it uses a high performance communications
system called Infiniband and is liquid cooled.
Srinidhi Varadarajan, director, Terascale Computing Facility,
Virginia Tech, will speak on “System X: Building the Virginia
Tech Supercomputer” at a colloquium at 2 p.m., Tuesday, Feb.
3, at NASA Langley's H.J.E. Reid Conference Center.
Media Briefing: A media briefing will be held at 1:15 p.m. at
the H.J.E. Reid Conference Center, 14 Langley Blvd., NASA Langley
Research Center. Members of the media who wish to attend should
contact Kimberly W. Land at (757) 864-9885 or 344-8611 (mobile) to
arrange for credentials.
Varadarajan will talk about what motivated the idea for System
X, its architecture, and the challenges faced in building,
deploying and maintaining a large-scale supercomputer.
In 2000, Varadarajan earned his Ph.D in computer science from
the State University of New York, Stony Brook. In his current
position as director, he also serves as an assistant professor in
the Department of Computer Science.
Architect of System X, Varadarajan is the recipient of a CAREER
award from the National Science Foundation, the Egg Factory
Technology Innovation award and a Faculty Fellow award from
Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering.
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