By John Geralds, VNU
Net
Compaq and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) have won a
$45m US government contract to build the world’s largest
supercomputer for non-classified scientific and engineering
research.
The announcement comes on the heels of IBM’s $18m deal to build
a supercomputer for the US Navy.
The award, from the National Science Foundation, will see Compaq
build a powerful supercomputer comparable to those used for
classified weapons research at US national laboratories, according
to Michael Schneider, PSC’s senior science writer.
“Working in partnership with Compaq, we will create a system
that enables US researchers to attack the most computationally
challenging problems in engineering and science,” he said.
The three-year deal is based on PSC’s bid to provide a system in
2001 with peak performance of 0.4 teraflops. A six-teraflop device,
which will use faster Compaq Alpha microprocessors not yet
available, will later evolve from the system.
PSC and Compaq proposed a system architecture that will be
capable of processing six trillion mathematical calculations a
second at peak speed and a sustained speed of about one trillion
calculations.
The brain of the proposed system will be an interconnected
network of Compaq AlphaServers – 682 of them, each of which
contains four Compaq Alpha microprocessors running Compaq’s Tru64
Unix at 1.1Ghz.
The new machine is built on the Beowulf model of
constructing supercomputers by clustering commodity PC components
that are interconnected by a high-speed network. Beowulfs run Linux
and other free software.
Another contract, called the LANL project, for a new nuclear
weapons simulation computer is expected to be announced shortly.
Topping the list of bidders are SGI, Sun Microsystems and Compaq.
Missing from the list is IBM, which declined to bid on the
project.
PSC is a collaboration between Carnegie Mellon University, the
University of Pittsburgh and Westinghouse Electric.