Europe's new number 1: Leibniz' Hitachi

Munich 18 Aug 99 In March 2000, Europe will have a new number one supercomputer. As expected, the Leibniz Rechenzentrum Munich, has selected a parallel vector supercomputer as its new high-end machine. Surprising it is, however, not a Siemens/VPP or a NEC SX-5, but a Hitachi SR 8000. When installed early next year, the machine will have a peak performance of 1.3 Tflop/s. Two years later it will have been expanded to 2.2 Tflop/s. The machine which costs 30 million euro, is financed by the German and Bavarian governments.

The system from the Japanese manufacturer Hitachi, will have 928 Gbyte of memory to start with, later to be expanded to 1504 Gbyte, Disk space will amount from 7,4 to 10,0 Tbyte. Each node on the Hitachi has nine processors that share memory. Inter node communication is 26 Gbyte/sec, to be expanded to 76.

The machine, which will be available to all researchers in Germany, will be connected to the Gigabit-Wissenschaftsnetz (G-WIN) of the German research network (DFN) through a 800 Mbit/s HiPPI-Interface,

	Start configuration 2000	End configuration 2002
System peak speed:	1.3 Tflop/s	2.2 Tflop/s
Expected application performance:	400 Gflop/s	600 Gflop/s
Main memory:	928 GByte	1504 GByte

The HItachi vector machine will complement MPP machines (T3E) which are already available in Offenbach, Garching, Jülich and Stuttgart. There will be a German wide distribution and exchange of computing time, allowing users to choose the machine best fit to their job.

In Bavaria a newly formed Kompetenznetzwerk für Technisch-Wissenschaftliches Hoch- und Höchstleistungsrechnen in Bayern (KONWIHR) will organise meetings, initate projects and research.

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