Blue Horizon at SDSC upgraded to 1.7 Tflop/sSan Diego 15 November 2000 The IBM Blue Horizon system at the San Diego Supercomputer Center has been upgraded to 1.7 Tflop/s. The machine ranks on position eight in the recent TOP500 list and is the most powerful unversity supercomputer in the USA.
With funding from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy (DoE), the 1,152 processors on Blue Horizon were upgraded to 375-Mhz Power3-II processors, each with 1.5 Glop/s peak performance. Blue Horizon is helping researchers probe demanding, deep computing problems such as determining chemical reaction rates, designing new materials, simulating the nervous system, modelling water and pollutant transport, modelling climate and predicting storms, and understanding the origins of the universe. Using only 1,056 processors, less than its full complement of 1,152, the upgraded Blue Horizon has already run at a speed of 930 glop/s on the LINPACK benchmark used by the Top 500 list for its rankings. LINPACK solves a dense system of linear equations, and since the problem is very regular, the performance numbers give a reasonable measure of peak achievable performance. Funded through the NSF's Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) programme, Blue Horizon provides 1.7 Tflop/s of computing power and 576 gigabytes of memory for leading-edge academic research. Allocations on the machine are made through the NPACI national peer-reviewed allocation process, with preference given to problems that take advantage of the machine's unique capability.
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