DALCO has expanded the supercomputer "Albert 2" of the BMW Sauber F1 Team. The original Albert 2, which was also built by DALCO and featured 1024 Cores and 12.28TFlops, has been enhanced by the addition of 384 new compute-nodes based on Intel's Xeon E5472 quadcore processors. The new supercomputer, called "Albert 3", now features 4224 cores and a total of 8448 Gigabytes of main memory. The maximum computing power has increased to 50,7 TFlops, that's 50.700.000.000.000 arithmetic operations per second.

At the time of delivery, the performance of Albert 3 was equivalent to the 45th position in the Top500 list, and was the 3rd fastest system in private industry worldwide. Albert 3 weighs 38 tons and covers an area of only 24 square meters. It is mainly used for aerodynamic analysis using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The models used for these calculations are often larger than 100 million cells. [read more...]