Need A Supercomputer? Go To Tech.

If you need a supercomputer, Virginia Tech's is available.

System X, the 2,200-processor machine at the university's Terascale Computing Facility, is ready for prime time, and it's being offered to researchers for a song.

Actually, it's time and power those researchers can buy from the university in the form of "CPU-hours" on the computer.

Until now, System X had only been available to what Cal Ribbens, deputy director of the facility, called "friendly users." Those are researchers with experience using supercomputers and who were "willing to put up with the startup phase of a machine like this, which can have its ups and downs," as Ribbens put it.

While those friendly users got to use the System X gratis, the free ride is over. Researchers now have to pay for time on the machine, but at what Ribbens called "an aggressive pricing structure" and which the university refers to as "a cost-recovery basis." In other words, it isn't turning a profit.

Users are charged from 13 cents to 40 cents for each CPU-hour - how many of the 2,200 processors they use and for how long; the price depends on whether they're Tech faculty, a nonprofit organization or a general user.

While a high-end desktop PC can run a lot of scientists' software, there are some applications that require the kind of power only a supercomputer can deliver.

A computer's power is rated in FLOPS, or floating point operations per second. A modern desktop machine might be rated at several gigaflops (billions of operations per second), where System X performs at 12.25 teraflops - thousands of times more powerful. That kind of power is used for computer models of climate, as well as by researchers in drug design, fluid dynamics, and as Ribbens said, "most of the scientific and engineering fields."

Researchers who need supercomputing power for their work usually have to write proposals to various facilities and hope to be allotted time. Although they may have grants from organizations such as the National Institutes of Health or the Department of Defense, that doesn't guarantee them use of a system.

"At national supercomputing centers, you can't buy time with money. You have to write proposals," Ribbens said. "There are very few places you can go out and buy time on a machine like this."

Not that getting CPU-hours on System X is a matter of writing a check. Despite being available to the public, so to speak, Ribbens says the Tech supercomputer is really there for the Tech community. "We're not just hanging out our shingle so anyone can walk up and buy time," he said. "We built it first and foremost to help Virginia Tech do research."

Still, System X will be available to select partners who have ties to the university - for example, Ribbens said, "off-campus partners who already have a research collaboration with us or are interested in hiring our students, or who have some connection with Virginia Tech."

Even users looking for a lot of computing power probably won't need everything System X offers."A typical run might use 200 processors for six hours," Ribbens explained. "We don't have that many people who are going to use all 2,200." But there are power users out there: "We'll have some users who will use hundreds of thousands of CPU-hours in a year," he said