The 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, the most active in recorded history, brought catastrophe to the U.S. Gulf Coast and Central America: at least 2,280 deaths from Katrina and other storms; record damages of more than $128 billion and thousands of people displaced who have yet to return home.

released on 1/17/2007
CHAPEL HILL, NC–RENCI’S IBM Blue Gene®/L computing system will double its size and power in February with the addition of another 1,024 compute nodes. The upgraded system, named Ocracoke after the oldest active lighthouse in North Carolina, will consist of 2,048 compute nodes and will have a peak performance of 11.4 teraflops, meaning [...]

 
CHAPEL HILL, October 31, 2007—Integrated models for disaster planning and management, virtual environments for research and decision support, and computing and visualization to reveal the functions of proteins and gene mutations linked to cancer are among the presentations that will be featured in the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) booth at SC07 in Reno.

CHAPEL HILL, NC, August 8, 2007 – Residents living in flood-prone coastal areas of North Carolina can rest a little easier knowing that state emergency managers and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will soon have new state-of-the-art storm surge models to help them determine the best flood response to storms .

 
CHAPEL HILL, NC—New benchmarking results on Topsail, the Renaissance Computing Institute’s (RENCI) Dell cluster, showed a maximum performance of 28.77 teraflops—nearly 30 trillion calculations per second—more than quadruple the machine’s previous maximum performance.

CHAPEL HILL – The Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) scored its first ranking on the Top 500 supercomputers list with Ocracoke, its new IBM Blue Gene/L system.
Ocracoke, with 1,024 dual processor compute nodes, 1 gigabyte of memory per node and a peak performance of 5.7 teraflops, or trillions of calculations per second, was ranked 104th on [...]