“One of the fastest computer systems in the world has just been
acquired by the Department of Commerce to help the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) further improve existing
weather forecast models and develop new ones, Commerce Secretary
William M. Daley announced. The $15 million contract has been
awarded to High Performance Technologies, Inc. (HPTi) of Reston,
Va., to provide a High Performance Computing System to NOAA’s
Forecast Systems Laboratory (FSL), located in Boulder,
Colorado.”
“This acquisition will help researchers improve forecasts of
severe weather such as thunderstorms, tornadoes, and winter storms,
and ultimately, to save lives and property,” said Daley. “It will
also provide a boost to the American supercomputing industry,” he
added.”
“When the system is first installed, it will be running a
third of a trillion arithmetic operations per second, providing a
computer system that is 20 times more powerful than the computer
system the Forecast System Laboratory presently uses. By the final
upgrade in 2002, the HPTi supercomputer will be processing about
four TeraFLOPS of data or four trillion arithmetic computations per
second…“
“Ty Rabe, Director of High Performance Computing Marketing at
Compaq said, “Compaq’s ‘Better Answers’ is not merely an
advertising statement, it represents a mindset and commitment to
our clients. We partnered with HPTi to provide a technologically
superior solution to FSL. With this announcement Compaq
demonstrates its commitment to providing Linux-based supercomputing
systems, initially including Sandia’s CPlant project, and now FSL.
Compaq views these scalable Linux systems as an important part of
our total supercomputing solutions package.”