Intel Corporation and HP announced that Sweden's largest engineering school, KTH (Royal Institute of Technology), is increasing its high performance computing capability through the deployment of a 180 processor cluster comprising of 74 two-way Intel Itanium® 2-based HP Server rx2600s and 16 two-way Intel Itanium® 2-based HP Workstations zx6000. The new system will provide Swedish academic researchers and their international collaborators with a huge boost in processing power and shared memory to analyse complex problems in all areas of life sciences, bio-informatics, computational chemistry, materials science, astrophysics, fundamental physics and computational engineering. The new Itanium 2-based HP server cluster will replace the ageing, proprietary, system used by PDC (ParallelDatorCentrum), a centre within the Department for Numerical Analysis and Computer Science. Funded primarily by the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC), PDC is the main centre for high-end computing, storage and visualisation for the Swedish academic community. The extensive new HPC capabilities and increased performance provided by the HP Itanium 2-based system will dramatically increase the speed with which PDC's researchers can translate ideas into concrete predictions and ultimately more successful research. In the past, HPC has been virtually synonymous with proprietary solutions and traditional supercomputers. In today's climate of more cautious funding for scientific research, many computational science centres like KTH are shifting to industry standard-based cluster infrastructures because of their volume economic advantages. "A key driver in our choice was the Itanium 2 processor. This mainstream 64-bit processor is quickly becoming the architecture of choice for advanced HPC programmes in the global academic community," said Professor Lennart Johnsson, Director of PDC. "This, combined with HP's long-term commitment to delivering HPC solutions on the Itanium architecture and the level of performance of Itanium 2-based HP servers, made the selection of HP and Intel obvious." "A large scale IA64 resource will constitute a most valuable addition to the Swedish infrastructure," said Professor Anders Ynnerman, Director of SNIC. "PDC is a lead site for SNICs academic HPC resources and one of the first steps taken by SNIC is invest in new leading edge HPC resources to be located at PDC. The current HP IA64 cluster is the first part of this investment. PDC will play an important role by introducing clustered IA64 systems to Swedish users in need of 64 bit architectures." Ajay Malhotra, Director of Enterprise Marketing, Intel EMEA, commented: "Clusters based on Intel Itanium 2 processors provide the huge amount of processing power necessary to solve heavy computation problems affordably and efficiently and this investment is keeping KTH firmly at the forefront of advanced HPC. By deploying this solution, the institution is accelerating the pace of scientific discoveries and ensuring Swedish researchers can continue to make leading international contributions to science." "HP is committed to providing customers such as KTH with high performance, cost-effective computing capabilities at industry-standard economics and is building on a strong existing collaboration with PDC," said Rudi Schmickl, vice president, Business Critical Systems, HP EMEA. The final production version of the HPC system is due to go live in summer 2003 but plans are already underway to triple the capacity within a year through the addition of more Itanium 2-based HP servers. The system is also due to be incorporated into Sweden's national grid for scientific computing (SWEGRID). To further strengthen their collaboration, HP is committed to join the European Grid Support Center that PDC has established with CERN and the UK e-Science program.