Firefly (computer)
Encyclopedia
The Firefly computer is a high-performance computer cluster housed at the Holland Computing Center located inside of the Peter Kiewit Institute
at the University of Nebraska at Omaha
.
fabric. Later, the processors were upgraded to Quad-Core AMD
Opteron processors. This boosted the Center's rating from 21.5 TeraFLOPS
to roughly 60 TeraFLOPS and brought the total number of cores to 9,200.
The supercomputer
ranked 43 of 500 in the Top 500 Supercomputing Sites list in November 2007 but has since dropped out of the top 500 since the Center's rating was not updated after their upgrade.
Peter Kiewit Institute
The Peter Kiewit Institute is a facility in Omaha, Nebraska that houses academic programs from both the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's College of Engineering and the University of Nebraska at Omaha's College of Information Science and Technology....
at the University of Nebraska at Omaha
University of Nebraska at Omaha
The University of Nebraska at Omaha is a four-year state university located in Omaha, Nebraska, USA. Founded in 1908 as Omaha University, the institution became the public Municipal University of Omaha in 1931. It assumed its current name in 1968 following a merger into the University...
.
Specifications
The system originally ran on 1,151 compute nodes, each of which had two dual-core processors with four gigabytes of memory. Each node is connected to a high-speed, low-latency InfinibandInfiniBand
InfiniBand is a switched fabric communications link used in high-performance computing and enterprise data centers. Its features include high throughput, low latency, quality of service and failover, and it is designed to be scalable...
fabric. Later, the processors were upgraded to Quad-Core AMD
Advanced Micro Devices
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. or AMD is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Sunnyvale, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for commercial and consumer markets...
Opteron processors. This boosted the Center's rating from 21.5 TeraFLOPS
FLOPS
In computing, FLOPS is a measure of a computer's performance, especially in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of floating-point calculations, similar to the older, simpler, instructions per second...
to roughly 60 TeraFLOPS and brought the total number of cores to 9,200.
The supercomputer
Supercomputer
A supercomputer is a computer at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation.Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems including quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling A supercomputer is a...
ranked 43 of 500 in the Top 500 Supercomputing Sites list in November 2007 but has since dropped out of the top 500 since the Center's rating was not updated after their upgrade.