New Tflop/s SGI SN-1 for Dutch research

Up to now Dutch researchers had access to vector supercomputers, starting with the Cyber 205 in 1984. The SN-1 is the first non-vector computer, it is indeed a massive parallel machine. Because it is expected that a number of researchers will need time to convert and optimise their code, an SGI 128 processor Origin will be installed shortly, alongside the vector Cray C90.

Professor Baerends, member of the commission that selected the SN-1, stated that it was a hard but necessary choice to move away from vector processing. Although it is easier to program because one has more powerful processors, vector processors are becoming too expensive for general scientific use compared to RISC based parallel machines. Professor Baerends noted at the official announcement in The Hague, that it puts a burden on the scientist: he has to optimise his programme in such a way that it runs in parallel for 99.9% of the time to make efficient use of the 1000 processors available in the new machine.

Is a large supercomputer with a thousand processors costing several tens of millions guilders needed? Would it not be better to buy a bunch of PC/workstations and cluster them together? Definitely not, according to Dr. van Duijnen, chairman of NWO. He remembers that at the time of the first supercomputers, it was suggested to buy a large number of Commodore-64 machines instead of a very expensive big computer. Since then, the same argument but with a different kind of PC is used each time when a new Dutch research supercomputer is needed.

Professor Baerends showed that for a number of application areas, ranging form physics to medical applications, one large machine with enough memory and interprocessor connecting nodes is needed. For some applications, like looking for extra-terrestrial life or looking for prime numbers, a lot of work can be done on a distributed cluster of work stations, but they are exceptions.

The SN-1 supercomputer will be available to Dutch researchers until 2005. Somewhere along the line, the machine will get a mid life upgrade.

With the new national supercomputer being again an SGI, leaving all the other vendors once more without a large order, The Netherlands, at least on the academic level, is becoming more and more an SGI country. Recently, the Cray T3E at the Delft University of Technology was upgraded to 128 processors. The Universities of Eindhoven and Twente, jointly bought an 128 SGI Origin 2000 the other day. The largest VR facility is an Onyx powered Cave. Although there certainly are advantages in the fact that one company can offer more support, it could be advantageous for Dutch academic researchers when they had more of a choice between different modern architectures.