The idea of System X was conceived in March 2003 and designed in July of that year. By October 2003, it had achieved a sustained performance of 10.28 Teraflops (a trillion bytes of information), making it the third fastest supercomputer in the world today. Based on an Apple G5 platform, it uses a high performance communications system called Infiniband and is liquid cooled.
Srinidhi Varadarajan, director, Terascale Computing Facility, Virginia Tech, will speak on “System X: Building the Virginia Tech Supercomputer” at a colloquium at 2 p.m., Tuesday, Feb. 3, at NASA Langley’s H.J.E. Reid Conference Center.
Media Briefing: A media briefing will be held at 1:15 p.m. at the H.J.E. Reid Conference Center, 14 Langley Blvd., NASA Langley Research Center. Members of the media who wish to attend should contact Kimberly W. Land at (757) 864-9885 or 344-8611 (mobile) to arrange for credentials.
Varadarajan will talk about what motivated the idea for System X, its architecture, and the challenges faced in building, deploying and maintaining a large-scale supercomputer.
In 2000, Varadarajan earned his Ph.D in computer science from the State University of New York, Stony Brook. In his current position as director, he also serves as an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science.
Architect of System X, Varadarajan is the recipient of a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, the Egg Factory Technology Innovation award and a Faculty Fellow award from Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering.
