NSF Awards $45 Million to Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center for 6 Tflop/s supercomputer next year

The three-year award, effective Oct. 1, is based on PSC? proposal to provide a system, installed and available for use in 2001, with peak performance exceeding six teraflops. To achieve this, PSC and Compaq proposed a system architecture, based on existing or soon to be available components, optimized to the computational requirements posed by a wide range of research applications and which, at this level of performance, pushes beyond simple evolution of existing technology.

The brain of the proposed six teraflop system will be an interconnected network of Compaq AlphaServers, 682 of them, each of which itself contains four Compaq Alpha microprocessors. Existing terascale systems rely on other processors, but extensive testing by PSC and others indicates that the Alpha processor offers superior performance over a range of applications.

Development of this system will draw on a history of collaboration between PSC and Compaq, and represents an extension of PSC? history of success at installing untried, new systems ?resolving the myriad of unanticipated hardware and software glitches that come up ?and turning them over rapidly to the scientific community as productive research tools.

The PSC terascale system, to be located at the Westinghouse Energy Center, Monroeville, will be a component of NSF? Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program, supplementing other computational resources available to U. S. scientists and engineers.

"The PSC has ?with its partners at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh and Westinghouse ?an excellent record of installing innovative, high-performance systems and operating them to maximize research productivity," said NSF director Rita Colwell.

"We?e pleased that NSF? terascale initiative gives us this opportunity to use PSC? proven capability in high-performance computing, communications and informatics in support of the national research effort," said PSC scientific directors Michael Levine and Ralph Roskies in a joint statement. "Working in partnership with Compaq, we?l create a system that enables U.S. researchers to attack the most computationally challenging problems in engineering and science."

"Compaq is looking forward to working with the National Science Foundation and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and we are committed to the success of the terascale initiative," said Michael Capellas, Compaq? president and CEO. "With our AlphaServer systems and Tru64 UNIX, we are providing the technology infrastructure for some of the most advanced computing projects in the world. This is further proof of Compaq? leadership in high-performance computing and our commitment to help open new frontiers in science and technology."

Development and implementation of the terascale system, including software and networking, will draw on fundamental research in computer science. A significant strength of PSC is its tri-partite affiliation with Westinghouse and with Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh and the pooled computing-related expertise of faculty and staff at both universities.