INDUSTRY

Armonk, NY -- IBM announced that it will provide the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center (ARSC) with a powerful new supercomputer that will help researchers gain new understanding of the complex environmental relationships that support salmon and whitefish populations in the Gulf of Alaska. The new supercomputer dubbed “Iceberg” will power cutting-edge, three-dimensional models that will for the first time combine the currents and depths of the ocean with biological information of its aquatic life. This will give ARSC researchers new insight into the growth and demise of certain species of these fish over the last 30 years. Salmon and whitefish from the Gulf of Alaska account for nearly 56 percent of all seafood consumed in the United States, including 95 percent of all Salmon consumed. With a better understanding of the aquatic population and fishing patterns in the Gulf, the researchers at ARSC can take key data and help ensure populations of fish are remaining steady and strong. This information is critical to the fishing industry and economies of many Alaskan towns. Iceberg, capable of calculating five trillion operations per second, will be one the most powerful computing systems ARSC has. The supercomputer will contain 92 IBM eServer™ p655 systems each eight POWER4™ microprocessors and two IBM eServer p690 systems each with 32 POWER4 microprocessors all running AIX™, IBM’s UNIX® operating system. The systems will be connected together with IBM’s clustering technology. The POWER™ family of microprocessors is among the most widely used in the industry and can be found in Nintendo game consoles, Apple computers and some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers and storage systems. Additionally, IBM today announced it was the leading vendor of supercomputers in the fourth quarter of 2002, according to a recently released report from International Data Corporation on worldwide high performance computing segment revenue. In the quarter, IBM's revenue share of supercomputers was 36.7 percent, an 11.5 point jump from the previous-year’s quarter, according to IDC. [1] “When fully installed, ‘Iceberg’ will be one of our most powerful supercomputers,” said ARSC director Frank Williams. “This technology will allow us to expand our program into multi-teraflop testing, and allow scientists and researchers to perform simulations that we hope will allow us to make more informed decisions about our aquatic environment.” "IBM supercomputers are used to solve some of the most complex modeling projects in the world today. ‘Iceberg’ will give ARSC the speed and performance they need to push supercomputing to new level," said Surjit Chana, vice president, IBM eServer pSeries. The researchers and scientists at ARSC are undertaking very important research across a broad spectrum of environmental conditions that affect us all." During the past 30 years there have been significant shifts in the sea life and climate variances. By enabling the modeling of different geographies over such a broad span of time and space, researchers at ARSC and the University of Alaska are hoping to gain critical insight into why certain species of fish suddenly shift populations from one area to another or possibly die off all together. In addition, the biological information in these models may help predict algal blooms, which not only affects the number of fish in an area, but can turn normally benign shellfish into poisonous fare. Scientists at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) and other academic and federal agencies - along with researchers at ARSC - use Iceberg to research environmental challenges and ecosystem balances on land, in space and in the sea. The supercomputer will also be used for research in many other fields including bioinformatics, global climate change, ocean circulation, galactic formation, and artic engineering.