INDUSTRY

By Steve Fisher, Editor In Chief -- SGI has announced a contract to provide an Origin 3800 supercomputer to Professor Stephen Hawking's Cosmology Group at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. The announcement coincides with the Stephen Hawking 60th Birthday Celebration & Symposium which took place last Friday, Jan. 11. The event was organized in recognition of Professor Hawking's work and contributions to the understanding of fundamental physics and cosmology. Scientists from around the world gathered in Cambridge for the symposium, which included scientific meetings and workshops as well as a lecture by Professor Hawking himself. Hawking’s work has focused on the fundamental laws that govern the universe. With Roger Penrose he showed that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity implied space and time would have a beginning in the Big Bang and an end in black holes. However, it could be said that his most stunning achievement was the discovery that black holes are not really black but rather they emit every possible type of elementary particle with the thermal spectrum of a hot body, ultimately ending their lives in a gigantic explosion. Equally impressive of course was his theory that our universe and all it contains is in a highly distinctive quantum state having no boundary or edge. “SGI was truly honored to be invited to participate in the birthday celebrations for Stephen Hawking which included the dinner in his honor at St. John's College and the day-long seminar at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences. CEO Bob Bishop led a five member SGI delegation to the event,” said Walter Stewart, Director Global Marketing, Research and Education for SGI. “With presentations from among the most distinguished cosmologists and discussions with scholars from around the world, the event, for SGI, was a wonderful and graphic demonstration of how our tools enable brilliant minds to push back the boundaries of the known cosmos.” SGI’s Origin 3800 will reportedly be the core of a new British computational grid being installed in support of the COSMOS project, which allows scientists to model the history of the universe from the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang to the present day. That’s a model encompassing roughly 10 billion years. The Origin 3800 will be installed in February 2002, followed by what sounds like a significant upgrade by mid-2003. It will reportedly be the largest cosmology supercomputer in the U.K.

SGI’s Origin 3800

The configuration of the 3800 to be installed was not mentioned immediately but some very general information on the server is this: Based on the NUMA architecture, one can configure an SGI Origin 3800 system up to a single 512-processor shared memory system, or use partitioning to divide it into as many as 32 partitions and run them as a tightly coupled cluster. It runs the IRIX 6.5 operating system and has a maximum memory of 1 TB. Origin 3800 customers include the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, NASA Ames research Center and Volvo. SGI and Hawking’s Cosmology Lab have enjoyed a longstanding relationship with SGI supplying visualization and supercomputing systems since 1997. A recent joint effort of note was a demonstration of collaborative grid technologies (along with NCSA) at November’s SC2001 show in Denver. “Cambridge is a global lighthouse site for SGI,” Stewart commented. “With the imminent installation of an SGI Origin 3800, the UK Cosmology Grid is ensured the computer power it needs to continue to lead the world in cosmological research.”