New Two Teraflop IBM POWER4 Supercomputer to Aid Scientific Research at NCSA.Business Editors/High-Tech Writers CHAMPAIGN, Ill.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 4, 2002 The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (body, World-Wide Web) National Center for Supercomputing Applications - (NCSA) The birthplace of the first version of the Mosaic World-Wide Web browser. Address: Urbana, IL, USA. http://ncsa.uiuc.edu/. (NCSA (1) (National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Urbana-Champaign, IL, www.ncsa.uiuc.edu) A high-performance computing facility located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. ) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Early years: 1867-1880 The Morrill Act of 1862 granted each state in the United States a portion of land on which to establish a major public state university, one which could teach agriculture, mechanic arts, and military training, "without excluding other scientific announced today that it will deploy an IBM POWER4 p690 supercomputer capable of performing two trillion operations per second to study a wide range of science and engineering problems, including structural mechanics, computational chemistry, and fluid dynamics. The supercomputer, a cluster of 12 IBM eServer p690 UNIX systems, is currently being installed and will be available to the scientific research community through the National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance) in early 2003. "The POWER4-based supercomputer will complement our terascale Linux clusters and meet a very important need for large-scale shared memory systems in support of memory-intensive computing," said NCSA Director Dan Reed. "This installation, combined with the Linux clusters that will form the bulk of the TeraGrid computing system, will give NCSA the world's largest computing system available for peer-reviewed open scientific research." The two teraflop (unit) teraflop - 10^12 flops. Intel beat Hitachi to the record of 1.06 teraflops, on 04 Dec 1996, unofficially in Beverton, Oregon, using 7264 Pentium Pro chips. IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, www.ibm.com) The world's largest computer company. IBM's product lines include the S/390 mainframes (zSeries), AS/400 midrange business systems (iSeries), RS/6000 workstations and servers (pSeries), Intel-based servers (xSeries) supercomputer consists of 384 1.3 GHz processors with a total of 1.5 terabytes of memory. It will replace NCSA's 1,512-processor SGI (SGI, Sunnyvale, CA, www.sgi.com) A manufacturer of workstations and servers, founded in 1982 by Jim Clark. The company was founded as Silicon Graphics, Inc., but changed to its acronym in 1999. Origin2000 array, which has a peak performance of 660 gigaflops (GIGA FLoating point OPerations per Second) One billion floating point operations per second. See FLOPS. (unit) gigaflops - (GFLOPS) One thousand million (10^9) floating point operations per second. and 614 gigabytes total memory. The POWER4 system is a Shared Memory MultiProcessor (SMP (Symmetric MultiProcessing) A multiprocessing architecture in which multiple CPUs, residing in one cabinet, share the same memory. SMP systems provide scalability. As business increases, additional CPUs can be added to absorb the increased transaction volume. ) system, making it particularly valuable for running applications with very large memory requirements, including engineering and chemistry codes and a large number of commercial codes. Four of the SMP nodes will each have 256 gigabytes of memory, making the system the largest shared memory resource available through the National Science Foundation's Partnerships for Advance Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program. The system will become the newest computing resource of the Alliance, one of the two PACI partnerships. The TeraGrid, another NSF-funded project, will equip NCSA by the end of 2003 with another 10 teraflops of computing capability through IBM Itanium-based Linux servers. The TeraGrid and the POWER4 system, combined with two teraflops of Linux cluster power already deployed, will give NCSA a total of 14 teraflops of computing power within the next year. "Adding IBM eServer pSeries systems to NCSA's powerful IBM xSeries-based grid delivers on IBM's vision of grids' essential heterogeneous nature," said Peter Ungaro, IBM vice president, high performance computing. "Using our fastest servers available, NCSA's system offers excellent performance for some of science's most demanding applications." |
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