Inauguration of new supercomputer for scientific use in Finland

Espoo 05 November 2002 A new IBM supercomputer was inaugurated at CSC on Tuesday, November 5th. The system is indisputably the most powerful in the Nordic countries, the second most powerful computer for academic use in Europe, and globally it ranks 33rd. The high-performance computer can compute 2.2 teraflop/s, or in other words, more than two thousand billion calculations per second.

Matti Ihamuotila, Managing Director of CSC, emphasises the national significance of the new system. "In supercomputer acquisitions, the Ministry of Education has been a bold forerunner. For example, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts ECMWF made a subsequent decision to acquire a similar system to the IBM eServer Cluster 1600 now being inaugurated."

CSC's Research Director Jari Järvinen describes the uses of the supercomputer: "Scientists at universities and research institutes in Finland use the new system for demanding computing assignments in biosciences, physics, chemistry and engineering sciences, for example for modelling the birth of the universe and cell respiration. The supercomputer is a centralised service provided by the Ministry of Education to support Finnish science. Also the Finnish Meteorological Institute's weather forecasts, computed four times daily, will be transferred from the Cray T3E to the new supercomputer in December."

The IBM Server Cluster 1600 system consists of sixteen nodes or independent computing units that have been connected with a switch system during this fall. Final preparations are now being made for the supercomputer's production use and the predecessor system Cray T3E will be removed from customer use in December.

The vendor of the IBM eServer Cluster 1600 system is WM-data X-Way. Each pSeries 690 node is equipped with 32 new Power4 copper processors, the first of their kind in Finland. The computing capacity of one node is 140 gigaflop/s, which means that one node can calculate 140 billion floating point operations per second.

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