APPLICATIONS

PITTSBURGH, Pa., and PALO ALTO, Calif. -- The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) and HP announced they have formed a strategic alliance to demonstrate the potential of the National Science Foundation's extensible TeraGrid. HP will add an HP Itanium2/Linux cluster to PSC's computing environment, and PSC will participate in HP's worldwide grid program, and join the Gelato Federation, an HP-sponsored worldwide consortium focused on enabling open source Linux-based Itanium computing solutions. Membership in Gelato is awaiting approval from the organization's council. Through their collaboration, PSC and HP expect to further the TeraGrid goals of enabling scalable, open source, commodity computing on IA64/Linux to address real-world problems. The added HP Itanium2/Linux cluster will complement LeMieux, PSC's six teraflop True64/Alpha system, the most capable unclassified system in the world. The TeraGrid will provide the nation's fastest and most powerful computing grid, with the goal of demonstrating grid services by running key applications by 2004. By connecting LeMieux, PSC will demonstrate the heterogeneous computing potential of the TeraGrid, and the added HP Itanium2/Linux cluster will further demonstrate TeraGrid heterogeneous capabilities. Through its worldwide grid program, HP relates to grid participants worldwide and has internal grid investments with nodes in Bristol, England; Palo Alto, Calif.; Nashua, N.H, Houston, Tex., and other locations. HP is also a founding sponsor of the Gelato Federation, http://www.gelato.org. PSC will bring its experience in grid computing middleware, applications and highest performing computing and communications to the Gelato effort. HP will collaborate with PSC as early adopters and leaders in grid computing by: -- participating in selected major grid projects, -- running meaningful benchmarks, helping to scale up performance and capacity, -- understanding how to evolve grids to utility computing. PSC also plans to use the HP Itanium2/Linux architecture for future high-performance computing needs. The alliance will use HP equipment, which will be installed at PSC. In addition, HP engineers and researchers, both from the High-Performance Technical Computing (HPTC) Division as well as from HP Labs, will work with PSC personnel to run tests and realistic benchmarks to help ensure successful elaboration of the TeraGrid. PSC will port and tune key applications to HP Itanium2 machines running Linux. These activities will be performed in the context of PSC's membership in the Gelato Federation. This collaboration builds on well-established and successful relations with HP University Relations, the HP HPTC product divisions, pre-merger Compaq and going back to joint agreements between PSC and Digital. The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center is a joint effort of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh together with Westinghouse Electric Company. It was established in 1986 and is supported by several federal agencies, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and private industry.