I've seen some pretty impressive student computers on campus, and the video editing stations in the Media Center can certainly hold their own with any desktop computer.  But none of these come close to the computing power of Rocks2, Wabash chemistry professor Scott Feller's new research computer.

It's a system Tim Allen would love.  Rocks2 is composed of 32 individual Dell PowerEdge 1950 servers, each with two 2.8GHz Intel Xeon processors. The system runs at 175 gigaflops, meaning it can perform 175 billion instructions per second.

The servers are connected through Cisco Infiniband switches, which offer high bandwidth and low latency. Thanks in part to the Infiniband networking, Rocks2 operates at nearly 95% of its maximum theoretical computing power.

Feller created Wabash's first parallel supercomputer (named Little Giant) in August 1998, and has built newer, faster ones every couple of years since then. The systems are used for carrying out molecular modeling studies of biological membranes. According to Feller, "These simulations represent each atom in the system as a particle, providing extremely high spatial and temporal resolution for the study of molecular structure and dynamics. Unfortunately, such a detailed model requires large amounts of computer time (typically we follow 10⁴ atoms for 10¹⁰ time steps)."

On the Rocks2 system, this large computational task is divided among the 64 processors, allowing the simulation to run much more quickly than would be possible on a typical single-processor computer.  You can learn more about Feller's research here.