VISUALIZATION

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - European research institutes are linking together four supercomputers to create the world's fourth most powerful megacomputer, without having to spend the money it would normally cost to build such a monster. By connecting the four computers through a high-speed network and clever software, they can act as one, the four institutes said on Tuesday. A more powerful, faster computer, will allow scientists at the institutes to perform research that would otherwise have been impossible, said Victor Allesandrini, who heads one of the participating research labs, the IDRIS institute at the French national center for scientific research. "The point is to boost European research. We have to produce new science that could not be produced before," he said, adding he expects the new grid-computer to be ready by spring 2005. He also heads up the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications, an initiative partially funded by the European Commission. Faster computers allow scientists to perform complex calculations needed for material science, cosmology, fusion research, life sciences, computational fluid dynamics and environmental sciences. In life sciences, for instance, the task may look deceptively simply -- say, calculating the way a protein folds -- but the number of possible permutations is so huge that record computing power is needed to crack the problem, which holds the key to determining how proteins interact with other molecules. The other research groups involved are the Juelich Research Center at the Garching Center for Computing and the Max-Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Germany, and the Italian Consorzio Interuniversitario of joint universities. After the summer, British institutes EPCC and ECMWF, CSC in Finland, and SARA in the Netherlands will also join the grid, which is being stitched together by IBM. If the power of the new grid computer were regarded as a single supercomputer, it would rank behind supercomputers Bluegene/L and Columbia in the United States and Earth Simulator in Japan.