Tulane Marches Into the Top500 for Supercomputing

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Today is Lundi Gras, traditionally a day of rest during Mardi Gras back when I was a young Louisianian.

While that may have changed, the Tulane University band is still hopefully resting between marching in last night’s Bacchus parade and the Rex parade tomorrow. But, one member of that New Orleans university’s campus won’t take a break for the Carnival season. That would be Cypress, one of the world’s fastest computers.

Photo of Tulane supercomputer Cypress built by Dell

Cypress’ creation has its roots in Dell World, our biggest celebration each year. It’s there that Charlie McMahon, vice president for information technology and chief technology officer at Tulane, first saw our Dell Networking Z-Series Core and Aggregation Switches – specifically the Z9500 – that Cypress is built upon.

“There’s 132 40 gig ports in this switch. One switch. The latency within that infrastructure is 600 nanoseconds,” McMahon recounts in the video below. “I said, if we could design a super computer around this switch – size it just right for this switch – that would be a sweet little machine.”

So, that’s just what our networking and high performance computing teams set about to design.

“About three weeks later I get a phone call that says ‘We can do this. Do you want one?’” recalls McMahon. “So, we were the first customer to buy a supercomputer built around this Z9500 ethernet switch.”

Cypress now puts Tulane in the elite group of universities in the United States that have high-performance computers on the Top500 list. It is being used for sea-level rise calculations, brain injury research studies and other complex, data-heavy projects that need hefty computational power. Tulane has even contracted with the National Football League Players’ Association to use Cypress to conduct long-term tracking of players who have a higher risk of traumatic brain injury, according to Christine Fronczak with Dell’s High Performance Computing team.

You can learn more about how Tulane is rebuilding a world-class infrastructure by building a 100-fold faster network and adding 10-fold more storage without adding IT staff in our case study on the project.

About the Author: Laura Pevehouse

Laura Pevehouse was profiled as one of five “social media mavens” in the March 2009 issue of Austin Woman Magazine and named an AdWeek’s TweetFreak Five to Follow. She has been part of the Dell organization for more than 15 years in various corporate communications, employee communications, public relations, community affairs, marketing, branding, social media and online communication roles. From 2014-2018, Laura was Chief Blogger/Editor-in-Chief for Direct2DellEMC and Direct2Dell, Dell’s official corporate blog that she help launch in 2007. She is now a member of the Dell Technologies Chairman Communications team. Earlier in her Dell career she focused on Global Commercial Channels and US Small and Medium Business public relations as part of the Global Communications team. Prior to that, she was responsible for global strategy in social media and community management, as well as marcom landing pages, as a member of Dell’s Global SMB Marketing, Brand and Creative team. When she was part of Dell’s Global Online group, Laura provided internal consulting that integrated online and social media opportunities with a focus on Corporate Communications and Investor Relations. She managed the home page of Dell.com, one of the top 500 global web sites in Alexa traffic rank, and first brought web feeds and podcasts to the ecommerce site. In her spare time she led Dell into the metaverse with the creation of Dell Island in the virtual world Second Life. Laura has earned the designation of Accredited Business Communicator from the International Association of Business Communicators, and received her Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from Louisiana State University. Before joining Dell Financial Services in 2000, she worked at the Texas Workforce Commission and PepsiCo Food Systems Worldwide.
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