Tours of Supercomputer available to general public

Virginia Tech will conduct public tours of its Terascale Computing Facility featuring System X, the University's supercomputer, starting Friday, Sept. 3, and continuing throughout the year.

The tours will be offered at 30-minute intervals, beginning at 3 p.m. and ending at 4:30 p.m.

Virginia Tech made supercomputing history in the fall of 2003 when it created the most powerful supercomputer at any university in the world in record time. The ranking was released in November of 2003 when the SuperComputing conference was held in Phoenix, Ariz.

In January of 2004, Virginia Tech announced its plans to migrate its cluster of 1100 Power Mac G5 desktop computers that made up the supercomputer to Apple's new Xserve G5 rack mounted 1U server. Xserve G5 is the most powerful Xserve yet.

The rebuilt machine is now running, and new numbers will be submitted for this fall's ranking. The tours are for the general public and there is a registration form at: http://www.tcf.vt.edu/pub_tour.html

Founded in 1872 as a land-grant college, Virginia Tech has grown to become among the largest universities in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Today, Virginia Tech's eight colleges are dedicated to putting knowledge to work through teaching, research, and outreach activities and to fulfilling its vision to be among the top research universities in the nation. At its 2,600-acre main campus located in Blacksburg and other campus centers in Northern Virginia, Southwest Virginia, Hampton Roads, Richmond, and Roanoke, Virginia Tech enrolls more than 28,000 full- and part-time undergraduate and graduate students from all 50 states and more than 100 countries in 180 academic degree programs.