MHPCC announces availability of Its new IBM RS/6000 SP supercomputer;

"We are pleased to offer our clients this highly productive computational platform," said Gene Bal, director of MHPCC. "The addition of the current generation IBM SP technology will extend our leadership in scalable computing technologies and meet the growing computational requirements of our users."

Tempest contains 46 4-processor P3 nodes and provides a robust environment for DoD, government, commercial, and academic users developing large-scale, computationally demanding parallel applications. Squall is composed of four 4-processor P3 nodes and 32 IBM SP POWER2 Super Chip (P2SC) nodes and provides a parallel application development platform for government, commercial, and academic users.

During January, selected users had early access to Tempest to run large jobs and computationally intensive applications. This included testing popular scientific and engineering application software, such as Cobalt, an unstructured grid flow solver developed by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL); GAMESS, a popular general ab initio quantum chemistry package maintained by the members of the Gordon research group at Iowa State University; and STAR-CD, a leading computational fluid dynamics code distributed by Adapco.

Future plans include the coupling of Tempest with Typhoon, MHPCC's 176 node P2SC system, to provide a combined computational resource with a total of 427 processors and a peak computational capability of approximately 300 Gigaflops (300 billion scientific calculations per second). This process will begin with an operating system upgrade of Typhoon, currently scheduled for April.

MHPCC is a US national supercomputing center of the University of New Mexico established through a Cooperative Agreement with the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. Located in the Maui Research and Technology Park in Kihei, Hawaii, MHPCC is dedicated to providing DoD, government, private industry, and academic users with access to the latest high performance computing resources. MHPCC is a Distributed Center of the DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program, a SuperNode of the National Science Foundation's National Computational Science Alliance, and a member of Hawaii's growing science and technology community.