NCSA in the USA to install 2 Tflop/s supercomputerChampaign 28 October 2002 The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the USA will deploy a new 2 Tflop/s supercomputer to study a wide range of science and engineering problems, including structural mechanics, computational chemistry, and fluid dynamics. The machine will be part of Teragrid.
The two teraflop IBM supercomputer consists of 384 1.3 GHz processors with a total of 1.5 terabytes of memory. It will replace NCSA's 1,512-processor SGI Origin2000 array, which has a peak performance of 660 gigaflops and 614 gigabytes total memory. The POWER4 system is a Shared Memory MultiProcessor (SMP) system, making it particularly valuable for running applications with very large memory requirements, including engineering and chemistry codes and a large number of commercial codes. Four of the SMP nodes will each have 256 gigabytes of memory, making the system the largest shared memory resource available through the National Science Foundation's Partnerships for Advance Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program.
The system will become the newest computing resource of the Alliance, one of the two PACI partnerships. The TeraGrid, another NSF-funded project, will equip NCSA by the end of 2003 with another 10 teraflops of computing capability through IBM Itanium-based Linux servers. The TeraGrid and the POWER4 system, combined with two teraflops of Linux cluster power already deployed, will give NCSA a total of 14 teraflops of computing power within the next year. The TeraGrid will enable thousands of scientists around the country to share computing resources over the world's fastest research network in search of breakthroughs in life sciences, climate modeling and other critical disciplines.
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