Of interest: NPACI, IBM USHER IN NEW AGE OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERYWITH THE DEDICATION OF BLUE HORIZON AT SDSC (fwd)

["Richard H. Fifarek" <rfifarek@som.siu.edu>]

Subject: Of interest: NPACI,
     IBM USHER IN NEW AGE OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY WITH THE DEDICATION OF BLUE
    HORIZON AT SDSC


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 9, 2000

NPACI, IBM USHER IN NEW AGE OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY
WITH THE DEDICATION OF BLUE HORIZON AT SDSC

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO - The National Partnership for 
Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) officially named its 
new, 1,152-processor IBM RS/6000 SP system at a dedication ceremony 
at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) February 9. The event 
featured remarks by representatives from government, IBM, NPACI and 
UCSD, and the scientific research community. The system--the most 
powerful computer available to the U.S. academic community --will 
henceforth be known as Blue Horizon.

"The name suggests the dawn of a new age in scientific discovery," 
said Sid Karin, director of NPACI and SDSC. "With simulations on a 
scale never before possible, this system will allow researchers to 
better understand the workings of the human nervous system, design 
the next generation of drugs against HIV and other diseases, and 
tackle complex issues of climate and the environment."

Blue Horizon gives the research community a tool for breakthroughs in 
such areas as climate modeling and weather prediction, mapping and 
modeling the human brain, modeling ecosystems and the transport of 
substances through the environment, investigating the biochemical 
interactions of molecules and cells, and mapping the genomes of 
living organisms. For more information on Blue Horizon, see 
http://www.sdsc.edu/Resources/bluehorizon.html.

"By linking the massive computing power of the RS/6000 SP with the 
leading researchers of our time, we bring together human intelligence 
and technology to solve Nature's most perplexing mysteries," said Lou 
Bifano, IBM Vice President for Strategic Alliances and Pervasive 
Computing, who attended the dedication ceremony. "The RS/6000 SP has 
established itself as a leader in scientific and technical computing, 
and our partnership with NPACI provides further evidence of our 
commitment to provide solutions for problems of global scale."

Blue Horizon has a peak speed of 1.02 teraflops--a trillion 
floating-point operations per second - generated by 1,152 Power3 
processors running at 222 MHz. The processors are organized into 144 
eight-processor SMP High Nodes. Each node has 4 GB of memory, for a 
total system memory of 576 GB. The associated disk can store 5.1 
terabytes (5,100 gigabytes) of data. The machine can be viewed on the 
Web at http://www.sdsc.edu/Live/teraflops.html.

The teraflops machine was officially accepted by SDSC management 
December 30 after successfully completing a battery of tests that 
demonstrated stable operation, good performance, and high throughput. 
The test results show that the new machine will provide the 
capability to solve problems in days that typically require weeks, 
months, or years on smaller machines. It is ranked tenth in the world 
on the list of Top 500 Supercomputer Sites (http://www.top500.org/) 
maintained by the University of Tennessee and the University of 
Mannheim.

Allocations of time Blue Horizon will be made through national peer 
review, with preference given to problems that take advantage of the 
machine's unique capability to solve very large problems. See 
http://www.npaci.edu/Allocations/ for more information.

The National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure 
(NPACI) unites 46 universities and research institutions to build the 
computational environment for tomorrow's scientific discovery. Led by 
UC San Diego and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), NPACI is 
funded by the National Science Foundation's Partnerships for Advanced 
Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program and receives additional 
support from the State and University of California, other government 
agencies, and partner institutions. The NSF PACI program also 
supports the National Computational Science Alliance. For additional 
information about NPACI, see http://www.npaci.edu/, or contact David 
Hart at SDSC, 858-534-8314, dhart@sdsc.edu.

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