Mercury Cluster

IllinoisRocstar Mercury Cluster

IllinoisRocstar LLC has recently purchased a new in-house compute cluster named Mercury in honor of the first US manned space missions. The cluster is an advanced computational resource for IllinoisRocstar, consisting of 32 dual-processor, quad-core 2.4GHz Intel Nahelem-based nodes with 16 GB of RAM each, for a total of 256 cores and 512 GB of RAM. The cluster head-node has dual quad-core 2.66 GHz Nahelem processors and 32 GB of RAM, with 4TB of hard disk in a RAID 5 configuration. Communications are facilitated by both a Gb ethernet management fabric and a Quad-data rate (QDR) Infiniband high speed interconnect. The cluster was purchased from the AMAX company in Fremont, CA.

Unpacking the cluster. Chief Scientist Tom Jackson (foreground) "supervising" the work, Mike Campbell (red) and Katrina Cheney (yellow) working on crate, and George Zagaris waiting to start programming!

COO Mark Brandyberry (left) and CEO Bill Dick (right) maneuver the cluster through the hallways to the server room.

Excellent Cabling Job (thanks AMAX!) and Mercury nestled in it's home, ready for some power...

Mark Brandyberry measures for some last minute door clearance issues...

Bill Dick (foreground) and Mark Brandyberry (background) plug Mercury in for the first time!

After an afternoon of hard work, we're ready to compute! Left to right (front): George Zagaris, Tom Jackson, Katrina Cheney, Bill Dick, (rear) Mike Campbell, Mark Brandyberry

News Briefs

                        
January 2010, IllinoisRocstar LLC has been notified of award of Phase I STTR contract with the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) entitled "High-Fidelity Multiphysics Simulations of Nozzle Erosion."

December 2009, IllinoisRocstar LLC has been notified of award of Phase I SBIR contract with the U.S. Army entitled "Behavior of Minimum Signature Propellants During Impact Tests on Insensitive Munitions."

November 2009, IllinoisRocstar LLC has been notified of award of Phase I STTR contract with NASA entitled "Efficient Quantification of Uncertainties in Complex Computer Code Results."

September 2009, IllinoisRocstar LLC took delivery of a 256-core Intel Nahelem-based compute cluster.

June 2009, IllinoisRocstar LLC has been awarded a Phase II SBIR contract with the U.S. Army entitled "Experimental and Computational Program for Slow and Fast Cookoff for Insensitive Munitions Testing."

June 2009, IllinoisRocstar LLC has been awarded a Phase II STTR contract with the U.S. Air Force entitled "Novel Alternative Energetic Propellants for Space Propulsion". 

March 2009, IllinoisRocstar LLC has been notified of award of Phase I SBIR contract with the U.S. Army entitled "Investigation of Supersonic and Hypersonic Missile Interceptor Base Flows Using an Advanced Computational Framework."

November 2008, IllinoisRocstar LLC has been notified of award of Phase I SBIR contract with NASA entitled "High-Fidelity Simulation of Turbofan Noise."

November 2008, IllinoisRocstar LLC has been awarded a simulation task contract with ATK, Thiokol Propulsion Corp. in Brigham City, UT.

September 2008, IllinoisRocstar LLC has been notified of award of Phase I SBIR contract with the U.S. Army entitled "Experimental and Computational Program for Slow and Fast Cookoff for Insensitive Munitions Testing."

August, 2008, IllinoisRocstar LLC has been notified of award of a Phase II contract with the U.S. Navy to continue work on Modeling Heated Jets in Crossflow. 

July 2008, IllinoisRocstar LLC has been notified of award of Phase I SBIR contract with the U.S. OSD/Air Force entitled "SRM Propellant Reconstruction from High Resolution Tomography."

July, 2008, IllinoisRocstar LLC has been notified of award of Phase I STTR contract with the U.S. Air Force entitled "Dynamic Behavior of Nano-Sized Particles in Novel Energetic Materials for Space Propulsion."

April, 2008, IllinoisRocstar LLC has been invited to submit a Phase II proposal with the U.S. Navy to continue work on Modeling Heated Jets in Crossflow. 

March, 2008, IllinoisRocstar LLC has been awarded a Phase I option contract with the U.S. Navy to continue work on Modeling Heated Jets in Crossflow. 

July 2007, IllinoisRocstar LLC has been awarded a Phase I STTR contract with the U.S. Navy entitled "Experimental and Computational Investigation of Nozzles in a Crosswind Environment" to perform modeling and validation of heated plume flows from elevated jets in crossflow. Validation experiments will be performed by the Aeronautical Engineering department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.