PHYSICS

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) announced that it has completed the largest installation to date of IBM's high-performance switch. As part of the center's new DataStar supercomputer now in initial production, the new system represents the next-generation solution of IBM technology for SDSC. "This new IBM switch technology is very impressive," said Phil Andrews, director high-performance computing at SDSC. "We now have a high performance switch that is commensurate with the power of the latest processors. This allows for the creation of true systems for capability computing as opposed to loosely coupled clusters." By migrating to an IBM eServerT pSeriesR infrastructure of POWER4T systems running the AIX 5LT operating system, SDSC increased their teraflop performance and scalability, enabling the center's researchers to work on numerous projects for institutions and academic centers across the country simultaneously. As a result, SDSC researchers now have a much more advanced computational source to power their programs. One such program, which maps billions of stars across the universe, could lead to a number of scientific breakthroughs in astronomy and space travel. "The work being done by the SDSC is important to the future of astronomy and space travel. And now with dramatically increased performance of the new DataStar system, SDSC can take its research to the next level," said Dave Turek, Vice President, Deep Computing. "IBM's Power ArchitectureT technology is truly a leader in 64-bit technology in the market today and our customers continue to take advantage of its offering through our reliable, scalable and robust pSeries systems." SDSC serves a national community of scientific researchers through the center's allocated user system and the National Science Foundation's Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) program.