BYU has installed six new Dell supercomputing clusters, helping to enable students and faculty across the university to enhance research ranging from business and engineering to agriculture and physics.
The clusters, made up of 682 Dell PowerEdge 1850 servers and PowerEdge 1855 blade servers, range in size from 11 to 217 nodes. They’re located at six locations across campus. Together, the six clusters have a combined theoretical peak performance of more than 9 trillion floating point operations per second (TFLOPS).
Researchers on campus plan to use the systems to study mechanical, electrical and chemical engineering, industrial design and rendering, agricultural research, and chemical analysis. Students in BYU’s Marriott School of Business will use the clusters to do advanced statistical modeling.
“We’re very excited to have the new supercomputer and are grateful to donors Ira and Mary Lou Fulton for their generosity in helping to provide it,” said J. Kelly Flanagan (BS ’88), vice president of information technology. “Students and faculty will greatly benefit from the quantum leap we’ve just taken in processing power.”