Dutch universites buy 128 processor Origin 2000

Amsterdam, 08 December 98 The universities at Twente and Eindhoven have, together with SARA in Amsterdam, signed a contract on December 8th with SGI. Early next year a 128 processor Origin 2000 supercomputer will be installed at SARA in Amsterdam. The Dutch national science foundation contributed to the machine through its NCF foundation. The European tender closed on December 4th. This shows that evaluation for a large system, valued at 8 million Euro, can be done rather fast. The machine will be the second fastest supercomputer in the Netherlands.

The Technical University Eindhoven, the University of Twente and SARA have formed a consortium called Unite, that did buy the machine and will take care of exploitation.

The machine has 128 R10000 processors at 250 MHz with 4 Mbyte cache and 56 Gbyte of central memory. and 550 Gbyter of disk.

The universities will use the machine for flued and thermodynamic applications and simulation of chemical reactions.

NCF sees the machine as a good opportunity to learn researchers parallel processing. "The importance of powerfull, general usable , parallel systems is evident: there are no other high-performance systems anymore" commented NCF director Patrick Aerts.

Ad Emmen