Florida A&M’s new supercomputing cluster is being developed using Apple Xserve G5s and Small Tree Communications’ InfiniBand cluster, according to a statement from Small Tree. The 128-node cluster project is dubbed Laser Interactions with Materials for Identification Technology (LIMIT), and was created to develop tools and techniques to remotely detect hazardous materials.
Florida A&M assistant professor of physics Dr. Lewis Johnson said that the types of matrix manipulations they’re doing lend themselves well to the G5 and its vector processors. The team visited Virginia Tech’s Terascale Computing Facility to see how they’d implemented Xserves and InfiniBand networking technology in their own system, he said in a statement.
The project was awarded by the United States Army Space and Missile Defense Command, and wll be located at Florida A&M’s new Center of Plasma Science and Technology.