Pople  (SGI Altix 4700)

Pople was an SGI Altix 4700 shared-memory NUMA system comprising 192 blades. Each blade held 2 Itanium2 Montvale 9130M dual-core processors, for a total of 768 cores. Each core had a clock rate of 1.66 GHz and could perform 4 floating point operations per clock cycle, bringing the total floating point capability of Pople to 5.1 Tflops.

The four cores on each blade shared 8 Gbytes of local memory. The processors were connected by a NUMAlink interconnect. Through this interconnect, the local memory on each processor was accessible to all the other processors on the system. Pople ran an enhanced version of the SuSE Linux operating system.

Pople was in production from 2008 through 2011.

Research

Some of the important research enabled by Pople is highlighted here. To see more, check the Projects in Scientific Computing archive.

Wakeup Call for Public Data

Alessandro Acquisti and Ralph Gross, Carnegie Mellon University

With data-intensive computing on PSC’s Pople, Carnegie Mellon researchers expose vulnerability in online information.
Read the full article: https://www.psc.edu/science/2009/privacy/

Asking “What if?” About H1N1

Shawn Brown, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and Bruce Lee, University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health

Computational modeling at PSC helped policymakers locally and nationally evaluate strategies for responding to the 2009 H1N1 flu epidemic.
Read the full article: https://www.psc.edu/science/2010/h1n1

Natural Reaction

Dean Tantillo, University of California, Davis

Quantum computations combined with chemist’s know-how offer the prospect of enzymes designed to produce useful hydrocarbons called “terpenes” in one fast step, the way nature does it.
Read the full article” https://www.psc.edu/science/2010/terpene/