Petaflop Cray Supercomputer at TACC to Crunch HIPAA, FISMA Data

Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin announced Lonestar 5, its first ever Cray supercomputer and second petaflop system at the university.

Leapfrogging the Lonestar 4 system by a lot in terms of performance, the new Cray XC40 system will be equipped with Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 processors and is expected to reach a peak performance of 1.25 petaflops. Pushing for maximum core density, the new system will feature 30,048 compute cores, two 12-core Xeons on each of the 1,252 compute nodes. It will use a 1.2PB DataDirect Networks storage system as well as a Dragonfly network topology and the Cray Aries system interconnect.

Expecting to be deployed this year, Lonestar 5 will be used as the primary high-performance computing resource in the University of Texas Research Cyberinfrastructure initiative. Researchers across all 15 of the university system's institutions will be able to benefit from Lonestar 5.

Working with data sets for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), TACC's director of HPC Bill Barth said, the new system "will perhaps be the primary computing system for health researchers for the Dell Medical School in 2016." Barth added that they "will add new users across the state through our ability to support private health data."

At 5.168 petaflops, TACC's another supercomputer, Stampede, has ranked among the top 10 systems on the Top500 list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world six times, including the most recent June 2015 list. Stampede is based on Dell PowerEdge servers with Intel Xeon and Phi processors.

Lonestar 5 will share a work file system with TACC's Stampede, Maverick, and Wrangler systems, all integrated to support simulation data, Big Data applications, and visualization data for users at TACC.