With a peak performance of more than 6 teraflops, Cobalt will bring the total computing power at NCSA to over 35 teraflops and the disk storage to three-quarters of a petabyte. The SGI system will open new research frontiers for scientists in a wide range of disciplines. Cosmologists will be able to undertake large-scale simulations of the evolution of the universe, while atmospheric scientists access the system for on-demand data analysis in response to severe weather.

"The SGI Altix system will offer researchers a unique configuration that is not currently part of the cyberinfrastructure available to academic researchers", stated NCSA interim director Rob Pennington. "This system will make it possible to handle very large computational applications, create and retain large datasets and databases in memory, and enable real-time, interactive data analysis."

NCSA also plans to integrate the SGI SMP system with other national distributed resources through the TeraGrid/Extensible Terascale Facility cyberinfrastructure.

The SGI Altix system will diversify NCSA's current high-performance computing environment (Tungsten, Mercury, Copper, Titan, and Platinum) by providing an SMP environment with large shared memory pool and advanced I/O capabilities. The system will also be equipped with Altair PBS Pro job-management and queuing software and the SGI InfiniteStorage Shared Filesystem CXFS and with a 370 terabyte SGI InfiniteStorage TP9500 disk array. SGI will provide a common scheduling and storage environment between disparate system resources within NCSA's computing environment.

"Researchers will no longer need to spend time ensuring that their challenges fit within the confines of a system's memory or capability", stated Dave Parry, SGI senior vice president of the Servers and Platform Group. "Instead they will be challenged only by their efforts in creating new approaches to solving bigger problems."

"The Itanium 2-based Altix supercomputer is a powerful addition to NCSA's high performance computing centre", stated Jason Waxman, Intel director of marketing for the Enterprise Product Group. "The processing power of the Itanium 2-based system will give researchers the ability to see and analyze the universe in ways that were not even possible a few years ago."