IBM Bags Two More SP Supercomputer Deals

Computergram International, May 24, 1999

IBM Corp is getting more aggressive with its RS/6000 SP parallel supercomputers, and has announced two more supercomputer centers that are installing SP big iron. The North Carolina Supercomputer Center in IBM's stomping grounds of Research Triangle Park (that's where IBM builds its PCs and Netfinity servers) is paying $20m to acquire an SP configuration that will eventually grow to support a teraflop of processing power.

The supercomputer center, which currently has an SGI Cray T3E900 with 66 processors rated at about 43 gigaflops, will use the new SP to provide processing power to Duke University, several campuses of the University of North Carolina and dozens of universities and community colleges throughout the state. Specifically, the SPs will support workloads that are trying to find a cure to Alzheimer's Disease and perform analysis on manufacturing materials to improve them. The initial SP configuration will be delivered in the fourth quarter, and it will include 320 of IBM's 200MHz Power3 processors (160 two-way "Winterhawk" SP nodes) connected with SP switches to each other and to 1.45Tb of disk storage. This set-up will have about a quarter teraflop of processing power.

In late 2000, NCSC will swap out the Power3 processors for 640 Power3-II processors, which are expected to run at about 400MHz and provide twice the number crunching power, yielding a teraflop of aggregate power. It looks like the teraflop machine will use either 80 of IBM's forthcoming "Nighthawk" eight-way SP nodes, due later this year, or 40 of its "Nighthawk-II" 16-way SP nodes, due around the end of 2000. The latter NCSC configuration will also make use of an improved SP switch, which runs at 2Gbps compared to the 140Mbps of the current SP switch that is used in all SP models.

Earlier in the month, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California signed up for a 3 teraflops SP configuration, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee bought a 400 gigaflops SP machine in mid-April. But not every institution that is involved in supercomputing has big government money to throw around to buy SP supercomputers, of course. That's why IBM has donated a big chunk of the SP processing power that will be installed at a new $8m computing center at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. The Center for Advanced Scientific Computing and Visualization will use SP supercomputers to generate the images that researchers will use in what Brown is calling "the cave," which for lack of a better metaphor seems to resemble the holodeck on modern Star Trek episodes. In the cave, the computers project high resolution stereo images on the walls and floors to create a virtual, 3D reality that researchers can stand within an look around and, thanks to 3D glasses and special hardware and software that tracks how a person moves around the room, will show them moving through virtual hearts, virtual molecules and, unless researchers keep a tight rein on graduate students, probably virtually anything.