Tours of Supercomputer Available to General Public

Virginia Tech will has been conducting public tours of its Terascale Computing Facility featuring System X, the University’s supercomputer. The tours, which began on Sept. 3, will continue throughout the year.

The tours will be offered at 30-minute intervals, beginning at 3 p.m. and ending at 4:30 p.m.

Virginia Tech made supercomputing history in the fall of 2003 when it created the most powerful supercomputer at any university in the world in record time. The ranking was released in November of 2003 when the SuperComputing conference was held in Phoenix, Ariz.

In January of 2004, Virginia Tech announced its plans to migrate its cluster of 1100 Power Mac G5 desktop computers that made up the supercomputer to Apple”s new Xserve G5 rack mounted 1U server. Xserve G5 is the most powerful Xserve yet.

The rebuilt machine is now running, and new numbers will be submitted for this fall’s ranking. The tours are for the general public and there is a registration form at: http://www.tcf.vt.edu/pub_tour.html.