INDUSTRY

By Steve Fisher, Editor In Chief -- In this interview Compaq’s Ty Rabe, director of high performance technical computing solutions talks about the show, his company’s computing roadmap and its presence in the life sciences and entertainment markets. Supercomputing: Thanks for the interview Ty. How's your show been thus far? RABE: SC2001 is turning out to be our best supercomputing conference ever. We have a great line up of high performance computing solutions in our exhibit — from our new AlphaServer SC45, Compaq’s first off-the- shelf TeraOPS system, to Linux grids built with our partners, Unlimited Scaling, Inc. (USI), and Platform Computing. We’re very pleased with the level of interest. Supercomputing: If you would, please tell the readers about Compaq's high performance computing roadmap and how it may be influenced by the HP merger? RABE: Compaq’s roadmap is expanding. We will continue to enhance the AlphaServer family with higher performing Alpha processors and new software releases through mid-decade. We have added packaged Linux clusters based on both Alpha and our Intel-based ProLiant servers, and we will be releasing full-blown Linux supercomputers with USI and Platform Computing next year. And we plan to be installing and supporting grid solutions based on Platform’s Grid Suite as soon as it is released. With regard to the proposed merger with H-P, we are prevented from making specific comments while the acquisition is being reviewed by the various regulatory agencies. However, I can tell you that all of the efforts noted above will vigorously move forward, and, in the meantime, Compaq continues to compete vigorously with H-P. Supercomputing: Can you tell readers a bit about how and by whom, Compaq's high end offerings are being used in say life sciences or entertainment? RABE: Those are two great examples of fast-growing new high performance computing markets. In life sciences, Compaq AlphaServer systems did the computational heavy lifting behind the mapping of the human genome at Celera Genomics, the Whitehead Institute at MIT, and the Sanger Centre in the U.K. This year (2001), we designed and hosted the first large-scale proteomics factory for our partner, GeneProt. We believe that at 1.9 TeraOPS, this is the largest private compute farm in the world. We have bioinformatics installations at many of the world’s leading life sciences companies, including Incyte, Genentech, AstroZeneca, Merck, GSK, and others. And we continue to make equity investments in promising early stage life sciences companies, the latest in Entelos, a systems biology company with very exciting technology for predictive computer models of disease states. In entertainment, Compaq’s growth in digital film and video applications began with three studios pushing the state of the art in special effects: Santa Barbara Studios, Digital Domain, and Mass Illusion. Santa Barbara Studios was working on American Werewolf in Paris and Spawn. They found that our AlphaServers increased their rendering performance by a factor of four to 10 times their old computing platform. Then we were off to the Oscar races as Digital Domain selected Alpha systems for rendering and compositing Titanic, and Mass Illusion for What Dreams May Come. Blue Sky Studios then borrowed some Alphas to complete Bunny, their Oscar-winning animated short feature. Now they are a huge Compaq customer and will soon release Ice Age. With these successes we’ve supplied digital video solutions to many more studios and related companies over the past few years. Supercomputing: As a company, what at SC2001 is Compaq most proud of? How about you personally? RABE: As a company, Compaq is most proud of our track record delivering terascale supercomputers this year. We have installations running at greater than 1 TeraOPS peak performance at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, Celera Genomics, and GeneProt. We’ve also demonstrated with these and other AlphaServer SC customers that Compaq can deliver, install, and make operational a terascale system faster and more reliably than any other vendor. Personally, I’m proud of our contribution to the SC2001 technical program. I had the good fortune to serve on the SC2001 Executive Committee and Chair the Industry Advisory Committee. Our team, representing the high performance computing vendor community, put together the Masterworks program, which offered a total of 20 invited papers describing high performance computing solutions to real-world problems. Topics ranged from computational biology to time migration in the oil industry. Masterworks has become one of the most popular tracks in the SC program in just two years. I’d like to thank two colleagues on the committee, Barbara Horner-Miller of the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center and Ray Paden of IBM, for the many hours of work they contributed to Masterworks this year. ---------- Supercomputing Online would like to thank Ty Rabe for his time and insights. ----------