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Singapore - The Linux Competency Centre at Singapore Computer Systems (SCS-LCC) has commissioned a new 60-processor CPU Intel® Itanium® 2-based cluster for the Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA) at the National University of Singapore. The SMA cluster, named HydraIII, is the first large-scale Intel Itanium 2-based Beowulf cluster to be deployed into production using the open-source Rocks cluster toolkit, whose development is led by the San Diego Supercomputer Center. The cluster was installed with Rocks and had applications running in less than a day. "The rapid deployment by SCS of the HP system demonstrates that 64-bit high performance clusters are now as easy to build as 32-bit x86 processor systems,” said Leslie Ong, Director, HP Business Critical Systems, South East Asia. "Such efficiency in rollout underscores the growing momentum to move to open standards from proprietary systems in the scientific community,” he added. "The increasing demand for high-performance computing power will be a major driver of computing innovation throughout the next decade. We expect clusters and grids using the open standard Intel Itanium processor family to deliver the performance and affordability required by the industry," said William Wu, Itanium processor family marketing manager, Asia Pacific. HydraIII cluster supports about 50 SMA researchers and post-graduate students involved in various projects, ranging from computational fluid dynamics to bio-engineering. The cluster consists of fifteen HP rx5670 nodes, each with four Itanium 2 processor, and is interconnected with a high-performance, high-bandwidth, low-latency switching system from Myrinet. The cluster's operating system software is Red Hat Linux, managed by the tools of NPACI Rocks version 2.3.2. Current Linpack performance achieves around 70% of theoretical peak processing power (240GFLOPS) at 167GFLOPS over the Myrinet interconnect. "We are very pleased with the performance and ease of management of the Rocks-based Itanium 2 cluster," said Prof. Khoo Boo Cheong, Program Co-Chair of High Performance Computation for Engineered Systems at SMA. "We intend to encourage more researchers to migrate to HydraIII over the next few months. The technical expertise and assistance that the SCS-LCC team has provided to us made a huge difference to our transition to 64-bit Linux parallel computing." "The team took less than a day to install the cluster with Rocks and getting the cluster operational. This is a testimony to the amount of work that has gone into making Rocks one of the best and easiest to use cluster toolkits in the world," said Laurence Liew, manager of the SCS Linux Competency Centre. "SCS Linux Competency Centre collaborates closely with the San Diego Supercomputer Center on NPACI Rocks and provides critical support in the areas of file systems and queuing systems," said Dr Philip Papadopoulos, program director for SDSC's Grid and Cluster Computing group. "The Rocks user community benefits greatly from SCS' expertise and their significant contributions to this community toolkit."