APPLICATIONS

CHAMPAIGN, IL--The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 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 IBM 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 Origin2000 array, which has a peak performance of 660 gigaflops and 614 gigabytes total memory. The POWER4 system is a Shared Memory MultiProcessor (SMP) 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. The TeraGrid will enable thousands of scientists around the country to share computing resources over the world's fastest research network in search of breakthroughs in life sciences, climate modeling and other critical disciplines. "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."