ACADEMIA

GLASGOW, SCOTLAND -- HP (NYSE:HPQ) today announced at the Global Grid Forum that the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) will connect a 9.2-teraflop HP supercomputer to the DOE Science Grid. When the installation is complete, the supercomputer will be the largest attached to a computer grid anywhere in the world. The first teraflop of the HP supercomputer will be connected to the DOE Science Grid by the end of August, making it the first supercomputer available on the system. The entire 9.2 teraflops is expected to be fully operational in spring 2003. PNNL's purchase of the HP supercomputer was announced earlier this year as the world's most powerful Linux-based supercomputer. The well-balanced system, including a new parallel file system, will provide greater power to the scientific user community, which will use the supercomputer to address complex challenges facing DOE and the nation. "Just as scientific research organizations developed and drove the adoption of the Internet in the 1980s, today's research organizations are working to establish grid computing as a standard practice in the next generation of enterprise computing," said Stephen Squires, HP vice president and chief science officer, who is delivering the keynote address at the forum. "HP and PNNL are working together to deliver collaborative tools, production-quality resources and services to the scientific community." The DOE Science Grid (http://www.doesciencegrid.org) was established in late 2001 as part of DOE's Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program and consists of five research laboratories including PNNL, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory. Institutions nationally and worldwide are using this grid to conduct large simulations, analyze data and coordinate experiments in disciplines such as chemistry, high energy physics, fusion, climate and life sciences that require high-end computing resources, databases or equipment at widely distributed locations. Typically, the scientific community accessing these resources also will be highly distributed, often worldwide. The HP supercomputer will be made available for data access and transfer as well as computational access. Proposals to compute on the system are assessed through a competitive proposal process run by the William R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL), a DOE scientific user facility at PNNL. Most of the access granted is for large "grand challenge" projects led by teams of scientists focused on addressing large problems over three years. More information is available at EMSL's molecular science computing facility Web site (http://mscf.emsl.pnl.gov). "The DOE's office of Biological and Environmental Research is providing the single most powerful resource on the grid, adding significant horsepower to the research efforts of the partners on the DOE Science Grid," said Scott Studham, computer operations group leader, EMSL molecular science computing facility. "The shared power of this resource will allow this research to be conducted more collaboratively and more efficiently between PNNL, its four partner labs on the Grid, and other scientists who are working on these important scientific research projects." PNNL will install Globus software on the HP supercomputer to enable resource management, data movement and security between research groups. Users will prove their identity on the grid via GSI (Grid Security Infrastructure) authentication credentials, the Globus security standard. The availability of the HP supercomputer to the DOE Science Grid will be advertised through Globus MDS (Monitoring and Discovery Service), a secure catalog of resources available on the Grid.