By Steve Fisher, Editor in Chief -- The Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory announced today that it has ordered a $24.5 million Linux-based supercomputer from Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE:HWP). The massive system will enable researchers to apply significant computational resources to a variety of scientific challenges. Upon completion the system should place very high on the Top 500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. The system consists of 1,400 of the next generation of Intel’s Itanium family of processors (code-named McKinley and Madison) and the goal is to have it fully operational by early 2003. According to an HP press release the supercomputer will have an expected total peak performance of over 8.3 Teraflops. It features 1.8 Terabytes of memory and 170 Terabytes of disk space.
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| Artist’s rendering of the new HP system |
“This supercomputer validates our belief that the high performance technical computing market will increasingly adopt industry standard building blocks, architectures and open platforms as opposed to proprietary platforms and architectures. As a result, customers will continue to see benefits in terms of cost and performance,” said Martin Fink, HP’s general manager of Linux systems operations. “Finally, this deal demonstrates to the world that there is more than one top player in the high performance computing space.” The new supercomputer will be installed at the Molecular Sciences Computing Facility within the William R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL), a DOE scientific user facility at PNNL. DOE's Office of Science sponsors EMSL through the Biological and Environmental Research program. Researchers will be granted access to the system based on a competitive proposal process and will use it to examine the complex chemical problems that form the basis for new discoveries in areas like: life sciences, subsurface transport, material design, atmospheric chemistry and combustion. In addition, scientists will apply the supercomputer to the study of geochemistry & biochemistry; radioactive & chemical waste detection, storage & management; systems biology; genomics; proteomics; materials science; fundamental studies in chemistry and computer science; and catalysis. “The HP system has been tailored to the types of chemistry-oriented calculations that are so important to our research. The overall balance of the architecture, leading to very high performance on our type of computations, was key to our decision to acquire this system,” said Dave Dixon, associate director of theory, modeling and simulation, EMSL. “We’ll be able to use the new supercomputer to do a greater number of research projects as well as to conduct far more complex simulations. The new computer can be considered to be a unique kind of instrument…the one that we will use as we continue to make computer simulations the third leg of science, together with theory and experiment,” Dixon continued. “Our goal is not only to interpret experimental results, and guide new experiments by doing good simulations, but to provide quantitative results that can actually replace experiments that are too difficult, dangerous or expensive.” Delivery of the supercomputer will reportedly begin with the arrival of HP McKinley-based nodes in mid-2002 and conclude in 2003 with a final shipment of HP Madison-based systems.
