CHAMPAIGN, IL, --NCSA's new IBM POWER4 p690 supercomputer, capable of performing two trillion operations per second, becomes available to the general scientific research community on Tuesday, April, 1, the center announced today. The system will be used by researchers in a wide range of science and engineering disciplines, including chemistry, biology, astrophysics, atmospheric sciences, materials sciences, high-energy physics, and structural mechanics. Some of the questions these researchers will investigate include how biological systems work at the molecular and atomic level, how to better understand and predict severe storms, and how to build stronger, more stress-resistant aircraft and spacecraft. The supercomputer is a cluster of 12 IBM eServer p690 UNIX systems. It was installed at NCSA last November and for the last few months has been used by a selected group of "friendly user" scientists in preparation for offering it to the larger research community. "The Power4 system is a great addition to our computing resources and meets an important need for large-scale shared memory systems that support memory-intensive computing," said NCSA Director Dan Reed. "This system complements our terascale Linux clusters and positions NCSA as the leader in providing computing resources for peer-reviewed open scientific research." The POWER4 p690 consists of 384 1.3 GHz processors with a total of 1.5 terabytes of memory. It replaces NCSA's 1,512-processor SGI Origin2000 array, which has a peak performance of 660 gigaflops and 614 gigabytes of total memory. The POWER4 is a Shared Memory MultiProcessor (SMP) system, making it particularly valuable for running applications with very large memory requirements, including engineering and chemistry codes and a large number of commercial codes. The system is the newest computing resource of the National Computational Science Alliance, one of the partnerships of the National Science Foundation's Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program. It is also the largest SMP resource available through the PACI program. "This system shows our continued commitment to our SMP users. It is a powerful successor to the SGI systems that have served our user community over the years," said Mike Pflugmacher, NCSA's assistant director for computing operations. "We encourage users of our current SMP systems to take advantage of this system. It is configured to support the most demanding scientific and commercial applications." The NCSA POWER4 joins a 1-teraflop IBM Itanium-based Linux cluster machine and a 1-teraflop Pentium III Linux cluster that are currently available to the research community. A 2-teraflop Itanium 2 Linux cluster was recently installed through the NSF TeraGrid project and will be offered to the user community later this year. This summer NCSA will receive more Itanium 2 Linux clusters with an additional 8 teraflops of computing power through the TeraGrid project. When completed, the TeraGrid will include 20 teraflops of computing power distributed among five sites nationwide.