INDUSTRY

ARMONK, NY -- The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has selected IBM to provide the world's most powerful supercomputer for predicting climate changes that impact agricultural output, heating oil prices and global warming. The announcement came as IBM captured the number one position on the independent TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers. Code-named "Blue Sky," the system will improve NCAR's climate modeling capabilities by an order of magnitude when fully complete in September 2002. Blue Sky will be powered by IBM's SP supercomputer and IBM eServer p690 systems, achieving a peak speed of nearly seven trillion calculations per second with 31.5 trillion bytes of IBM SSA disk storage. "Supercomputers play a uniquely powerful role in helping scientists identify important climate trends," said Surjit Chana, vice president, high performance computing, IBM Server Group. "The National Center for Atmospheric Research is enabling researchers to understand the climate changes that impact our lives." As the United States' primary computing system for climate studies, NCAR's Blue Sky will accelerate research in global and regional climate change, droughts, short- and long-range weather prediction and warnings, wildland fires, turbulence, atmospheric chemistry, space weather, and other critical areas. This research is particularly important in understanding the forces that impact the length of growing seasons for agricultural crops, the migration of crop belts over time, and the severity of upcoming winter seasons. "The addition of Blue Sky to NCAR's computing center is the single biggest increment in raw computing power in NCAR history," said Timothy Killeen, NCAR director. "It will provide U.S. scientists with speed, efficiency, and data storage space they need to stay at the forefront of climate, weather, and many other essential areas of research." The National Science Foundation, NCAR's primary sponsor, purchased the new system for use by researchers across the nation. The IBM machine will be assembled in two phases -- the first, beginning this year, will include IBM SP supercomputer technology and will more than double NCAR's processing capacity, operating under the code-name "Black Forest," to two trillion calculations per second. In the second phase, scheduled for next fall, Blue Sky will be added, consisting of IBM eServer p690 UNIX servers that will bring the machine's peak speed to seven trillion calculations per second. The NCAR announcement highlights IBM's dominance of The TOP500 List, published today by researchers at the University of Tennessee and the University of Mannheim in Germany. The list, which ranks the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world, illustrates in dramatic terms IBM's leadership in the high performance computing space: IBM has 158 systems on the list, more than any other vendor. By contrast, only 31 computers from Sun Microsystems made the list IBM has the most powerful supercomputer ?the classified ASCI White at Lawrence Livermore National Lab IBM has five of the top 10 most powerful machines, nine of the top 20, and 22 of the top 50; while Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard do not have a single system in the top 50 IBM systems account for a total of more than 49 teraflops (trillions of calculations per second) of processing power, more than twice the power of the combined Hewlett-Packard systems and more than nine times the power of the combined Sun systems An IBM system at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications is the first Intel Itanium-based system to be included on the TOP500 List Continuing a powerful trend, 261 of the systems on the list are devoted to business computing, compared with the 236 business machines that were on the list published in June 2000 The "TOP500 Supercomputing Sites" list is compiled and published by supercomputing experts Jack Dongarra from the University of Tennessee and Erich Strohmaier and Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim (Germany). The entire list can be viewed at www.top500.org