NSF TO GET WORLD'S LARGEST NON-MILITARY SUPERCOMPUTER.

Compaq Computer Corporation (NYSE: CPQ) and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) in Pittsburgh, Pa., have announced that the National Science Foundation (NSF) in Arlington, VA has selected them to build and manage the world's largest supercomputer to offer scientists access to a wide range of non-military, scientific applications.

The contract, valued at an initial $36 million for hardware, software and services, will be managed for NSF by PSC, with first delivery of systems expected by November 2000.

Based on Compaq's industry-leading AlphaServer SC architecture, the supercomputer will consist of 682 quad-processor Compaq AlphaServer systems with a total of 2,728 processors that will deliver peak computing power of greater than six trillion floating point operations per second (TeraFLOPS). The system will run Compaq's Tru64 UNIX operating system with 2,728 Gigabytes of memory (1 Gigabyte per CPU) and 50 Terabytes of storage.

Under terms of a joint agreement between Compaq and PSC, Compaq will provide the hardware, software, performance and benchmarking activities while PSC will do the porting, tuning and development of efficient parallel applications.

This supercomputer system will allow NSF to establish a single, new terascale computing system to enable U.S. researchers in all science and engineering disciplines to gain access to leading edge computing capabilities to look at such things as the structure and dynamics of proteins useful in drug design, storm-scale weather forecasting, and the modeling of earthquakes and global climate change.

"With this award, NSF and the National Science Board join with us at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center in recognizing the excellence of Compaq's high performance computing technology, and its potential to lead this leap forward in general-purpose, high-end scientific computing," said PSC scientific directors Michael Levine and Ralph Roskies in a joint statement. "We're pleased to be partnering with Compaq, and together with the computer science community we'll create a system that enables U.S. researchers to attack the most computationally challenging problems in engineering and science."

"Compaq is looking forward to working with the National Science Foundation and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and we are committed to the success of the terascale initiative," said Michael Capellas, president and CEO, Compaq Computer Corporation. "With our AlphaServer systems and Tru64 UNIX, we are providing the technology infrastructure for some of the most advanced computing projects in the world. This is further proof of Compaq's leadership in high-performance computing and our commitment to help open new frontiers in science and technology."

This award reinforces Compaq's emergence as the leading supplier of high performance computing systems.

At an announcement in Washington, D.C., Celera Genomics CEO and chief scientist Craig Venter highlighted the critical role played by Compaq AlphaServers and Tru64 UNIX in Celera's mapping of the human genome. Compaq AlphaServers running Compaq Tru64 UNIX also provided the computing power at the two largest sequencing centers supporting the public Human Genome Project -- MIT's Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts and the Sanger Centre in Cambridge, England.

And, in another related contract, the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) announced in February 2000 that it had selected Compaq's AlphaServer SC systems with Tru64 UNIX to build the largest supercomputer in Europe. When completed in 2001, the system will employ 2,500 Alpha processors to deliver five TeraFLOPS (five trillion floating point operations per second) of peak performance to simulate nuclear testing.

These contracts further validate Compaq's ranking by International Data Corporation (IDC) as the number two provider in the high performance technical systems and servers marketplace in 1999, just one point behind the leader and moving rapidly forward to possibly claim top spot before the end of this year. In addition, Compaq's Tru64 UNIX operating system has been rated number 1 in overall UNIX functionality by D.H. Brown Associates

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