MOVIES

BALTIMORE -- Information Processing Interagency Conference (IPIC) 2003 -- Platform Computing Inc. announced that it's Grid computing software will be used to power the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) $24.5 million, 11.4-teraflop HP supercomputer. Originally announced by HP in April 2002, the PNNL project is expected to create one of the world's most powerful Linux-based supercomputers, allowing researchers to apply an advanced computational infrastructure to address "Grand Challenge" scale environmental research problems. To enable reliable, on-demand access to enterprise compute resources, Platform LSF(R), the foundation of Platform's Grid solutions, will balance workload across the new HP supercomputer, which consists of 1,900 of the next generation of Intel(R) Itanium(TM) Family Processors. With its new high performance, Grid-enabled architecture, Platform LSF provides the highest levels of performance through its robust, scalable architecture and reliable advanced scheduling capabilities, making it ideal for PNNL's highly parallel, high performance computing (HPC) environment. Scheduled to be fully operational in 2003, the PNNL supercomputer is expected to be more than 45 times faster, have 50 times more disk space and have 30 times more memory than PNNL's current computer, which was one of the world's most powerful when installed in 1997. "With Platform's distributed computing software, we can manage our computing resources as if they were a single system environment, increasing the accuracy and effectiveness of the scientific programs that run on them," said Scott Studham, operations technical group leader for the Molecular Science Computing Facility at PNNL. "Platform LSF's open architecture integrated easily with our existing computing infrastructure, providing a seamless transition for scientists." "PNNL is setting a new standard for Linux high performance computing," said Rene' Copeland, president, Platform Federal. "PNNL is poised to take full advantage of all the computing power in its new supercomputer to perform research computations faster and more reliably than ever before. PNNL's deployment of Platform LSF 5 provides a strong, stable, and scalable foundation for this incredibly compute-intensive work, enabling them to accelerate environmental research." The HP supercomputer is being installed at the Molecular Science 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. The first 1-teraflop phase of the supercomputer arrived in summer 2002. The second phase will be delivered in March 2003. Scientists will be granted access to the supercomputer based on a competitive proposal process and will use it to study complex chemical problems that form the basis for new discoveries in areas such as material design, subsurface transport, material design, atmospheric chemistry, combustion and life sciences. In addition, they will apply the supercomputer to study geochemistry and biochemistry; radioactive and chemical waste detection, storage and management; systems biology; genomics; proteomics; materials science; fundamental studies in chemistry and computer science; and catalysis.