GOVERNMENT

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- HP today announced that the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) will deploy an HP supercomputer based on a cluster of more than 150 Intel® Itanium® 2-based HP Workstation zx6000 systems. OSC selected HP's computing cluster because of its blend of high performance, flexibility and low cost. The HP cluster will use Myricom's Myrinet high-speed interconnect and run the Red Hat Linux Advanced Workstation, a 64-bit Linux operating system. The state of Ohio established the OSC as a statewide computational resource for research universities and private companies. Recognized nationally as an innovator in cluster computing, the OSC provides shared high-performance computing and communications infrastructure to a wide range of disciplines, including computational chemistry, physics and mechanical engineering, as well as research in global climate modeling, weather forecasting and genetic sequencing. Approximately two years from initial installation, OSC plans to optimize its purchase by redeploying the workstations from the center's cluster to several higher education facilities throughout the state. "As a statewide resource, we need a supercomputer that delivers a performance advantage for the most computationally demanding tasks," said Doug Johnson, HPC Systems Developer, OSC. "We require the flexibility to support a wide variety of advanced research and future redeployment models that support graphics. HP's supercomputer best met these requirements and did it within our budget." "HP -- a company dedicated to innovation -- is delighted to have the world's greatest researchers, such as those supported by the OSC, leveraging our technology," said Jim Zafarana, vice president of worldwide marketing, HP Workstation Group Business Unit. "We see OSC's model of providing a high-performance shared resource as a truly valuable method of advancing the most demanding research needs." The theoretical peak performance of the system is estimated in excess of 1 trillion floating-point operations per second (1 teraflop) and is expected to provide computing performance that rivals today's fastest supercomputers at a fraction of the cost of existing systems in the same class. In a recent industry SPECfp benchmark, the HP Workstation zx6000 logged the world's fastest floating-point performance with SPECfpbase_2000 of 1,356. (See the July 8, 2002, press release titled "HP Announces Record-setting Performance on Itanium 2-based HP Servers and Workstations.") Along with the HP Workstation zx2000, the zx6000 systems are also the lowest priced systems delivering SPECfpbase_2000 above 1,000. In addition, HP was selected as the leader in a June 2002 ranking of the most powerful supercomputers of the world by the TOP500, an internationally known review sponsored by the Universities of Tennessee and Mannheim, Germany (see http://www.top500.org).