On February 3, Srinidhi Varadarajan, director of the Terascale Computing Facility at Virginia Tech and architect of the school’s Power Mac G5-based supercomputer, will discuss the achievement during the NASA-hosted lecture “System X: Building the Virginia Tech Supercomputer.”
Varadarajan will cover System X from its conception in March 2003 through the design work in July 2003 and its completion in October 2003. The supercomputer is the third fastest in the world, capable of 10.28 Teraflops, or a trillion bytes of information. It uses a communications system called Infiniband and is liquid cooled.
Varadarajan’s 2 p.m. lecture on February 3 will be open to NASA employees only, but he will also host a public talk at 7:30 p.m. that evening. The former will be held at NASA’s Langley Research Center, 14 Langley Blvd., Hampton, VA. The latter will be at the Virginia Air and Space Center in downtown Hampton; it will be free to the public with no reservations necessary.