Partnership Resources Support NPACI Participant Research

January 7--NPACI's 128-node IBM SP, CRAY T90, and 256-node HP Exemplar entered production status in January. In addition, SDSC took delivery of the first ever Tera Multi-threaded Architecture (MTA) system in late December 1997. Tera planned to deliver a two-processor system but did not receive production network boards for a multiprocessor system.

Placement of the Tera at SDSC results from a NSF multi-year award of $4.2million to UC San Diego. UC San Diego also received a $1.9million, 18-month DARPA award to implement, optimize, and evaluate defense-related applications for multithreading.

Also in December, SDSC received a 14-processor CRAY T90. The most powerful vector computer ever installed at an NSF-funded facility, the T90 provides a peak performance of nearly 24Gflops.

The 128-node IBM RS/6000 SP system, installed at SDSC in November 1997 to support NPACI users, is equipped with 160-MHz processors, the fastest available from IBM.

Also in November, Caltech completed the installation of a 256-CPU HP Exemplar X-class system with 64 gigabytes of main memory and one terabyte of disk space. Paul Messina, director of Caltech's Center for Advanced Computational Research and NPACI's chief architect, stated "We believe this is the largest number of processors ever connected in a shared-memory, cache-coherent system." The Exemplar is in production status for NPACI participants.

More Online: Tera MTA; IBM SP; CRAY T90