Falcon

History

Beginnings

Falcon was purchased in 2014 by Idaho National Laboratory. Falcon is an SGI ICE X system and was about 5 times as fast as its predecessor, Fission. When Falcon came online in November, 2014, it was ranked the 97th fastest computer in the world and was ranked 31st on the Green500 list. With 10 racks, 684 nodes and each node had dual Intel Xeon E5-2680v3 12 core processors running at 2.5 GHz. For a total of 16,416 cores, operating at a theoretical 657 TeraFlops

Upgrades

In 2017, Falcon went through a couple major upgrades. First was the addition of 4 racks which brought the core count upto 19200. Then the processors were replaced with the current Intel Xeon E5-2695v4 18 core running at 2.1 GHz. Falcon now has a theoretical peak of 1.17 PetaFlops.

Current

In April of 2022, INL turned the hardware over to University of Idaho, Boise State University, and Idaho State University to run collaboratively for university research. The supercomputer has been rebuilt using Rocky Linux 8.5 on the compute nodes. The dual Xeon E5-2695v4 processors in each node are packaged with 128 GB of RAM to complete RAM intensive jobs. In order to tackle some big data problems, Infiniband is used to connect the Falcon nodes to one another as well as a 1.3 PB Lustre parallel file system used for storage and scratch space.

Citation

If you need to cite Falcon for a publication, here is the text:

Idaho C3+3 Collaboration. (2022). Falcon: High Performance Supercomputer. University of Idaho. https://doi.org/10.7923/falcon.id