Cray C90 in Groningen to be upgraded to be replaced by and SV1Amsterdam 13 December 2001 At the supercomputing seminar in Amsterdam, Patrick Aerts, director of NCF, the Dutch foundation responsible for scientific supercomputing in the Netherlands, said that he will financially support the installation of a 32 processor, 32 Gbyte Cray SV1 at the University of Groningen. Although there are much more powerful machines available to Dutch researchers, still a number have existing code which is optimised for vector processing. Aerts also reported on plans for NCF for the future.
The NCF spend a lot of time on the new Teras supercomputer, the 1024 processor SGI Origin in Amsterdam, that is the main supercomputer for researchers in the Netherlands. This year, also an evaluation of NCF by an external committee, and by NWO (the Dutch Science organisation) has taken place. Although the final reports are not yet ready, it can be concluded that it is important for the Netherlands to have its own supercomputing facilities, and not as part of some international collaboration. NCF seems to be an excellent and flexible instrument for that. NCF should, however, try to broaden the basis of user disciplines, the 60-70 groups currently supported, mainly come from the Sciences. NCF should also look in co-ordinating national Grid activities. Aerts said, NCF will also look whether there is interest in placing work benches at several institutes across the country. Because of the recent acquisitions, the Netherlands are very well presented in the TOP500, noted Aerts. In Europe, we are fourth, after Germany, the UK and France. He expects that will gradually decline until 2006, when a new national supercomputer could be installed.
Ad Emmen [News on Advanced IT] [Calendar] [Analysis] [IT in Medicine] |
 |