Trisha Shetty (Editor)

SURFsara

Updated on
Edit
Like
Comment
Share on FacebookTweet on TwitterShare on LinkedInShare on Reddit

SURFsara is a Dutch foundation that provides supercomputers, colocation, networks and high-end visualisation to academic institutions. SURFsara has extensive expertise, both in usage and management of the facilities.

Contents

SURFsara was founded in 1970 as SARA (Stichting Academisch Rekencentrum Amsterdam) to deliver computing facilities to the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Universiteit van Amsterdam, and the Mathematics Centre (now Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica). On January 1, 2013, SARA merged with SURF (Stichting Universitaire Rekenfaciliteiten, foundation for academic computing facilities). The old SARA is now a besloten vennootschap with SURF as its holding foundation. To this day SURFsara mainly serves the academic world.

SURFsara is located in the Science Park Amsterdam in Watergraafsmeer. SURFsara also has a location in Almere.

SURFsara also offers colocation and hosting these days, and is one of the six locations of the Amsterdam Internet Exchange.

Supercomputers

  • Huygens
  • IBM System p-575 (3328 x POWER6 @ 4.7 GHz)

    • Lisa

  • Dell PowerEdge

    • GinA

    Previous supercomputers:

  • Huygens
  • IBM System p5-575 (1920 × POWER5+ @ 1.9 GHz)
  • Aster
  • SGI Altix 3700 (416 × Itanium 2 @ 1.3 GHz)
  • Teras
  • SGI Origin 3800 (1024 × MIPS R14000 @ 500 MHz)
  • SOLO
  • IBM pSeries 690 (192 × POWER4 @ 1.1/1.7 GHz)
  • Matrix
  • IBM xSeries 335 (72 × Xeon @ 3.06 GHz)

    • For high-end visualization, SARA offers among others:

  • Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE): a multiuser 3D virtual reality system based on multiple projectors and screens
  • Immersadesk: a derivative of the CAVE with a single projection screen

    • References

    SURFsara Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA