SGI SYSTEMS WILL MAKE THE OHIO SUPERCOMPUTER CENTER A WORLD LEADER IN PRODUCTION CLUSTER COMPUTING.

SGI (NYSE: SGI) has announced that it will install the company's first production cluster based A on Intel Itanium processors at the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC). The 146-processor system will provide the Ohio research and education community with the world's largest system using the new Itanium architecture. Part of the cluster will be devoted to the National Computational Grid Project.

"SGI is committed to bringing out the best, most powerful Itanium architecture-based solutions to the high-performance computing marketplace. We are delighted to continue our relationship with OSC to improve the performance and functionality of Linux clusters," said Jan Silverman, vice president, Advanced Systems, SGI.

OSC and SGI have a long history of working together on cluster technology. The relationship includes development of system software, applications software

and support infrastructure concepts that enable true production cluster computing (PCC). SGI and OSC have been working on code testing and porting on the Itanium architecture using a small test cluster that has been installed at OSC since September 2000. Some of the results of this work were showcased at SuperComputing 2000 in Dallas.

"Our partnership with SGI has allowed us to stay at the forefront of supercomputing," said Al Stutz, OSC director. "The installation of the Itanium processor-based cluster will provide the state of Ohio with a world-class research computing platform. We are pleased that this extends the working relationship among Myricom, OSC and SGI. The new Myricom2000 interconnect will allow us to get much higher sustained performance from our MPI jobs."

The new cluster will replace the existing cluster of 32 SGI 1400L servers, each with four Intel Pentium III Xeon processors at 500 MHz. To help it decide who will receive the processors from the original cluster, OSC will call for proposals from the Ohio academic community. OSC will assist faculty members in building smaller clusters in their own research labs. The systems will be provided with one-year hardware and software maintenance.

To encourage the spread of PCC in Ohio, OSC has developed a program called Cluster Ohio. The project provides statewide software licenses for compilers, debugging, math science libraries and performance tools at no cost to Ohio faculty. Ohio's research community will be able to access the new Itanium processor-based cluster through OARnet, a division of OSC. OARnet is the state's high-performance network providing Internet connectivity to more than a million people in the state of Ohio. The new PCC system will comprise 73 dual-processor servers with the Itanium architecture that will be interconnected with Myrinet2000 hardware. Each server will have two Itanium processors at 733 MHz, 2MB secondary cache per CPU, 4GB of SDRAM memory and 36GB of disk space.