Abe

Abe, named in honor of 16th president Abraham Lincoln, has a peak performance of more than 88 trillion calculations per second (88.3 teraflops). The system was purchased with funds from the state of Illinois and will be shared by researchers at the University's new Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies, headed by NCSA Director Thom Dunning, and by the national science and engineering communities served by the National Science Foundation.

Abe is a Dell blade system with 1,200 PowerEdge 1955 dual-socket, quad-core Intel Xeon 2.3 GHz processors, and InfiniBand and GigE connections. Each processor has 4 gigabytes of memory, providing a system total of 9.6 terabytes. The InfiniBand interconnect provides high-speed communication capability, enabling users to run tightly coupled applications that achieve high levels of scaling. The GigE control network allows for system diagnostic and machine-management functions without interrupting application communications. Abe will offer 170 terabytes of storage in a Lustre file system, providing 7.5 GB/s peak I/O performance.