Fifth anniversary of French national supercomputer centre IDRIS

Paris, 20 December 98 November was a celebration month at IDRIS. Last 19th of November, the centre celebrated his fifth anniversary in Paris, in a congress that assembled distinguished personalities in the field of the supercomputing. In total, 170 people were present in the Palace of Congresses in order to analyse the present supercomputing arena and predict the future.

The Institute for Development and Resources in Intensive Scientific Computing (IDRIS) was created in 1993. It is one of the two French supercomputing centres, together with CNUSC in Montpellier. The Institute, located at the Faculty of Sciences in Orsay, is the supercomputing centre of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). One of the objectives of the centre is to support the projects of French research groups that need a large amount of numeric calculation to solve their problems. IDRIS offers to its users several supercomputers: a Cray C94, a Cray C98, a Fujitsu VPP300 with 6 processors, and a Cray T3E with 256 processors. The global peak performance installed is 178,8 Gflop/s. The two storage management systems of the centre have 900 TBy of capacity. Each day it registers 400 GByte of movement and stores 50 GByte new. This capacity is expected to be increased 400 TBy in two months. IDRIS has 45 computer scientists working in the centre and hosts 500 scientific projects, 20% of them being renewed each year.

The National Academic Supercomputing Initiative in the USA (Mélanie Loots, NCSA). Loots offered a global vision of the supercomputing policy in the United States under the direction of the National Science Foundation (NSF). She also commented on the two main centres: the NCSA and the NPACI.

The HPC Technologies: Present and Future (Tadashi Watanabe, NEC, Japan). He predicted that chips with 520 milions of transistors, 6 GHz and 24 Gflop/s will be available in 10 years.

The Future of Vectors in Scalable Architectures (Steve Oberlin, Sillicon Graphics, EEUU). Oberlin predicted that, in 5 years, the SGI vectorial line (SV2, the old Cray), and the SMP line with NUMA arquitectures, will share the same operating system (IRIX), and the same programming environment.

Simulation Numérique du Climat et de ses Variations (Hervé Le Treut, IDRIS). He hinted that, in the next five years, the needs of calculation in Numerical Simulation of the Climate, will multiply by 90.

HPC. The Next Generation of Architectures and Applications (Paul Messina, California Institute of Technology, California). He revised and analysed the new and experimental equipments (ASCI Red and ASCI Blue, for example), and anticipated that Pflop computer will be ready to use in 2004.

Monica Tudela