January 12, 2010 - Today the Milwaukee Institute announced the first upgrade of its High Performance Computer Cluster (HPCC), designated hpc01.mkei.org. The system, located at Tushaus Computer Services (TCS), 10400 Innovation Drive, Milwaukee, WI will go from 16 Dell PowerEdge 1950 III servers to 29 servers, each containing dual quad-core compute nodes (232 cores total). Each core is an Intel 2.83 GHz 5540 with 32 GB of RAM virtualized with a VMware ESXi kernel. The cluster runs Red Hat Linux v5.2 with Dell's Platform OCS management suite. The cluster, interconnected with a QLogic 20GB 9040 Infiniband Switch, has a theoretical capacity of over 2 teraflops and a measured Linpack Benchmark of 1.8 teraflops. Additionally, the machine supports a Dell 1950 dual quad-core administrative Head Node with 64GB RAM and dual 300GB drives, a 10GB Ethernet admin network and a shared RAID storage subsystem with 8.5 terabytes of disk. Software available on the cluster currently consists of GNU C, C++, Fortran and MPI compilers and libraries, Intel C, C++, Fortran and MPI compilers and libraries, MathWorks' MATLAB R2009a Distributed Computing client workstation and cluster tools, and Wolfram Research's Mathematica 7 and gridMathematica client workstation and cluster tools. Usage of the Institute HPCC is currentlly available free of charge to selected academic, educational, governmental and industrial users for development of non-commercial modeling, simulation and visualization applications. Requests for access will be open on the mkei.org web site within the next few weeks. Users require website login credentials.