Thousands of scientists worldwide to use system; CERN takes delivery of Europe's most powerful IBM computer.

GENEVA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 2, 1994--IBM today announced that CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, has taken delivery of the most powerful IBM supercomputer ever ordered in Europe -- a 64-node, AIX(a)-based IBM Scalable POWERparallel Systems SP2(a).

Thousands of scientists, worldwide, will be able to have access to the SP2 interactivity via the Internet in order to collaborate on and execute scientific analyses. The SP2 will analyze experimental data faster, and speed the design of a proposed particle accelerator that will more effectively explore the mass of elementary particles. From terminals, desktop PCs and workstations, researchers can log on to the SP2 and use the system to analyze raw experimental data, exchange electronic mail and prepare research papers.

This is IBM's second major announcement regarding POWERparallel systems in a week. Last week, IBM announced that the fastest, most powerful general purpose computer in the world was delivered to the Cornell Theory Center in Ithaca, N.Y.

The SP2, a RISC-based, scalable parallel processing system, speeds work compared to traditional computers by linking from two to hundreds of processors that work in tandem (or "parallel") to quickly solve complex problems. The SP2 uses the AIX operating system, the IBM implementation of UNIX(b). Scientists can "parallelize" applications, enabling software to run much faster than on computers with only a single processor.

CERN will exploit the SP2's flexibility to simultaneously run software that requires one processor -- or serial processing -- while executing jobs that require parallel processing. Roughly one-third of the nodes on CERN's SP2 will support interactive use; one-third will run serial jobs; and one third will run parallel programs.

"We are delighted that CERN has chosen to acquire the SP2; their decision represents another milestone in our 18-year partnership," said Herb Budd, general manager of IBM's new Scientific, Technical and Education business in Europe. "The SP2 will not only provide a flexible and cost-effective platform for supporting the broad variety of computing tasks involved in CERN's quest to unlock the mysteries of mass, but will also provide a platform for developing parallel applications. These applications will help researchers conduct an ever-widening range of parallel processing projects ranging from building stronger, faster spacecraft to synthesizing advanced medicines."

"The overall design of the SP2 represents a very interesting trend in the computer industry," said David Williams, head of CERN's Computing and Network division. "The partitioning features should allow us to offer many different, advanced production-quality services on a single large system. We intend to study carefully how the SP2 compares in our environment, both to similar systems from other vendors and to loosely coupled clusters, of which we have many examples."

Interacting on the Internet

Scientists not physically located at CERN can access and exploit the power of CERN's SP2 through the Internet. Researchers and others can retrieve experimental results and research papers by typing the address http://www.cern.ch on the World Wide Web of the Internet. The SP2 will play the dual role of first providing a computing platform for physicists and then "serving" their research results for others to study.

The World Wide Web, a master bulletin board initiated at CERN, is accessible to Internet users via browsers such as Mosaic, introduced by the U.S. National Center for Supercomputing Applications. The Internet is a web of 25,000 corporate, educational and research computer networks that public sources estimate are accessed by 25 million people.

POWERparallel customers such as the Cornell Theory Center in New York and Maui High Performance Computing Center in Hawaii also use the World Wide Web of the Internet to give researchers access to their SP2 supercomputers and information about the projects for which they are used.

Designing an Accelerator in Record Time

One of the applications to run on the SP2 will trim the time needed for designing a proposed particle accelerator, called The Large Hadron Collider.

This accelerator will use more than 1,000 powerful superconducting magnets to force revolving protons into head-on collisions at record-high energies. Experimental results may prove the existence of the Higgs boson, which will explain the mystery of the wildly different masses of elementary particles.

Previously, it took CERN 35 days to run simulations suggesting the optimal number, size and placement of magnets in the Large Hadron Collider. The SP2 can run these simulations in just three days -- nearly 12 times faster.

The CERN installation complements the SP's involvement in other high energy and nuclear physics experiments. Researchers at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois are using an SP to correlate the behavior of high-energy physics particles such as quarks and leptons. IBM and Fermilab will also experiment with a new I/O node concept, which will explore novel ways to manage the flow of data to and from processors. The collaboration will explore alternative approaches to organizing massive data systems to be accessed through parallel I/O channels, including the use of object-oriented technologies. In addition, scientists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, who are building a high-energy collider for nuclear physics, use a POWERparallel System to simulate atomic particle collisions. They expect the collisions to produce a form of matter believed to have existed after the Big Bang.

Improving Data Analysis Technology

The SP2 at CERN will also be used to parallelize software such as data-analysis applications. These programs can enable scientists to filter huge amounts of information and spot subtle trends. Parallel processors like the SP2 are ideally suited for mining data because of their ability to extract information from vast databases and pools of information very quickly. By assimilating information from numerous sources and isolating specific patterns, scientists can conduct more precise analyses.

Marketing departments will also benefit from this technology. Market researchers can target potential customers and better serve existing consumers by tracking such things as spending habits and patterns of credit card fraud.

POWERparallel Systems Provide World-Class Performance

The SP2 at CERN will be equipped with 64 nodes, 16 of which have 128 MBytes of memory plus two GBytes of local disk (permanent information storage) per node, with the remaining 48 nodes having 64 MBytes of memory plus one GByte of local disk per node.

The SP2 offers excellent price/performance, high availability, scalability and flexibility. For example, in the most recent NAS pseudo application benchmarks, a 64-node SP2 outperformed all other similarly configured competitive systems.

The system provides users with a high rate of availability; since SP2 microprocessors work independently and do not share a common memory, multiple nodes can back each other up if problems arise. A similar system at the Maui High Performance Computing Center offered 98 percent availability with 80 nodes in its first four months.

Each element of an IBM SP2 can be easily and economically scaled, or expanded, as computing needs grow; systems can range from two to 128 processors; up to 512 processors are available by special request. The system also offers excellent flexibility and preserves existing software development investments by running the nearly 10,000 AIX applications enabled for the IBM RISC System/6000(a) workstations.

The SP2 combines the numerically-intensive capabilities of scientific and technical computers with the vast data storage and complex analysis strengths of commercial information processing systems. This makes the SP2 particularly well suited for solving complex problems in science and industry.

IBM's POWER Parallel Systems unit is headquartered in Somers, N.Y.

CERN

CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, is the world's largest scientific research center. Over 8,000 scientists, engineers and computer specialists from 75 nations collaborate to research into the fundamental building blocks of matter and the forces which hold them together. CERN is funded by 19 European member states.

CERN has a unique range of experimental facilities for particle phsyics research, including the Large Electron Positron Collider (LEP) which, with a circumference of 27 km, is the world's largest scientific instrument. At present, over 50 percent of the world's high energy physicists carry out their research at CERN.

EDITORS' NOTE: IBM news releases are available on the Internet, via the IBM Home Page available through Mosaic at http://www.ibm.com.

(a) Indicates trademark or registered trademark of International

Business Machines Corporation.

(b) UNIX is a registered trademark in the United States and other

countries, licensed exclusively through X/Open Company Limited.

CONTACT: IBM POWER Parallel Systems, New York

            Nadine Taylor, 914/766-2458 or 766-2407
                              or
            CERN Media Service, Geneva
            Neil Calder, 011-41-22-767-4101