Ribbon cutting in front of Big Ben (from left): Senior VP David Kiefer, Cray Inc.; Pennsylvania Senator Sean Logan, 45th District; Chief Executive Dan Onorato, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania; NSF Assistant Director Peter A. Freeman, Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering; President Jared L. Cohen, Carnegie Mellon University; Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg, University of Pittsburgh; Pennsylvania Senator Bob Regola, 39th District; NSF Director Arden Bement; President & CEO Steve Tritch, Westinghouse Electric Company; Co-Scientific Director Ralph Roskies, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center; Co-Scientific Director Mike Levine, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. Image Courtesy Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center

Speaking at the event, NSF director Arden Bement stressed that NSF's goal with the TeraGrid is to assemble cyberinfrastructure along the lines of other infrastructures—such as water and the electrical power grid—that we now take for granted.

"Already, with the TeraGrid," he said, "we have achieved a magnificent melding of sophisticated systems into a larger, more transformative tool. With this system we are fulfilling an important national goal—providing one of the fastest computing capabilities to the U.S. research community."

Acquired via an NSF grant, Big Ben (the name refers both to Ben Franklin and the Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback) comprises 2,090 processors with an overall peak performance of 10 teraflops. With Big Ben as a production resource this fall, the TeraGrid will provide more than 50 teraflops of capability.

The current lead system at PSC, LeMieux (3,000 HP Alpha processors, six teraflops peak), has been one of the most productive TeraGrid systems and will remain available for the foreseeable future. PSC and TeraGrid officials anticipate, however, that Big Ben will take over LeMieux's role as the TeraGrid resource best suited for very large-scale, demanding projects.

On a per processor basis, Big Ben is 2.4 times faster than LeMieux, but its key advance is exceptional inter-processor bandwidth. With its superior interconnect technology, Big Ben has already demonstrated nearly 13 times better performance than LeMieux on some applications when running 1,000 or more processors.

Big Ben is the last TeraGrid acquisition supported through the initial round of TeraGrid funding. A second set of NSF TeraGrid awards is expected soon. "This is an important piece to have in place," said TeraGrid director Charlie Catlett. "Big Ben brings advanced capability for large-scale parallelism and is a major boost for U.S science and engineering research."

Learn more at the TeraGrid Web site.