Computer supercluster helps seismic rock studies at U of T

A cluster of high-performance computers is being assembled at the University of Toronto to help engineers and seismologists understand the behaviour of rock under stress.
Equipped with 64 Dell PowerEdge 1950 servers, the new laboratory will enable researchers to recreate synthetic rock formations through the creation of millions of digital spheres. The spheres are given physical properties, which will enable researchers to track in real time how the rock particles react to stresses and variables.
The supercomputing cluster can perform trillions of complex calculations per second.
The university expects the new computer cluster will enable it to create rock models of up to 40 million digital spheres or particles. It has a total of 256 processing cores, running on both Red Hat Linux and Microsoft operating systems.
Dell Canada said the computer cluster at the University of Toronto “promises to become one of the world’s most prominent centres for engineering research and supercomputing.”