ENTERTAINMENT

Tallahassee, FLA. - Florida State University is now operating one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world after the installation of the second phase of equipment to an IBM system the university purchased two years ago. The IBM eServer p690, nicknamed "Eclipse," is ranked No. 34 among all government, industry and academic supercomputers in the world on the Top 500, a list compiled by the University of Tennessee and the University of Mannheim in Germany (www.top500.org). Among academic supercomputers in the United States, Eclipse is surpassed in power only by those at San Diego and Pittsburgh supercomputing centers, which are national consortia. With the addition of Eclipse, the IBM system can now perform 2.5 teraflops (2.5 trillion calculations per second). It would take a person 2 million years to perform the same number of calculations with an ordinary handheld calculator. "Computing power of this magnitude allows an investigator to look for answers to questions that couldn't have been asked before," said Joseph Travis, director of the School of Computational Science and Information Technology (CSIT). "This system puts FSU at the forefront of high performance computing and will help our students and faculty become leaders in computational research." The initial configuration of 168 processors, called Teragold, was installed in July 2000, shortly after FSU purchased the system for its CSIT. The addition of the 512-processor Eclipse this summer completes the system. The systems are not only fast, they also have a combined 213 terabytes of storage. FSU researchers are using the supercomputer for a number of projects including predicting the paths of hurricanes and understanding how nanostructures are formed. Meteorology and oceanography Professor Jim O'Brien, director of the Center for Ocean Atmospheric Prediction Studies, and a team of researchers also are using the supercomputer to develop better climate forecast models for planting crops prominent in the Southeast. In addition, COAPS researchers are using the supercomputer to develop high-resolution models of currents in the Gulf of Mexico that may provide practical information for oil producers, the fishing industry and recreational users of the waters. "We finally have a model of this part of the ocean that actually looks like nature," O'Brien said. "If it looks like nature then maybe we can understand it and forecast what's going to happen." The system is allowing CSIT to meet its ambitious education and research goals, Travis said. Established in 1999, faculty working through CSIT offer high-level interdisciplinary courses to train students in the use and application of computationally intensive methods in their research. Faculty members in CSIT perform research in basic computational science, and the school facilitates interdisciplinary research in areas such as hydrology, climate dynamics, bioinformatics, materials science and mechanics. "Innovative research in many areas often involves the use of large sets of data," Travis said. "Analyzing those data requires an enormous number of rapid calculations, which is why supercomputers have become such critical tools for scientists in a wide variety of disciplines." The IBM supercomputers are housed in the Bernard Sliger Building at Innovation Park in Tallahassee. The decision to buy the $8 million system in May 2000 was based in part on the opportunity for a multiyear partnership and collaboration with IBM Research, according to Larry Conrad, FSU assistant vice president for technology integration. "The new IBM eServer p690 supercomputer now in operation marks the culmination of a close partnership between IBM and FSU," said Peter Ungaro, vice president, IBM High Performance Computing. "FSU set out to build one of the finest computational science operations in the academic world and the power and scalability of our POWER4-based eServers and a partnership with our IBM's Research institute has helped to enable them to do that today." FSU has long been a leader in supercomputing. The university's first supercomputer was on the cutting edge when it was installed in 1985. It consisted of one processor and contained 32 megabytes of central memory.