Contact:
Ernie Herrera
(505) 277-8330
Chris Burroughs
(505) 277-1816
January 12, 1998
MAUI HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING CENTER TO INCREASE COMPUTING CAPACITY BY 50 PERCENT WITH NEW TECHNOLOGY
Scientists around the world using the Maui High Performance Computing Center (MHPCC), operated by the University of New Mexico, will find their computational problems being solved 50 percent faster in coming months. The reason is that MHPCC, one of the top 20 computing centers in the world, is in the process of purchasing and installing 192 nodes of IBM's latest RS/6000 SP technology, worth more than $5 million, which will provide a more effective environment for research, development and production. The center is used by some 1,500 scientists and computer experts who have access to MHPCC's hardware and software, archives and training materials over the Internet via one of the world's longest transoceanic data fiber optical lines.
Installation of the new technology, which are Power2 Super Chips (P2SC), is expected to start Jan. 17 with downtime for MHPCC users of about seven days. Each of the 192 nodes has an internal clock speed of 160 megahertz and a peak computational capacity of 640 megaflops (640 million scientific calculations per second).
"After the new nodes are installed, the computational capability of the center will increase from 167 billion scientific calculations per second to 255 billion scientific calculations per second. That's a significant increase," says UNM Math Professor Frank Gilfeather, who is one of three principal investigators for research at MHPCC, as well as executive director of the High Performance Computing, Education and Research Center.
The purchase of the technology is funded in part by a grant from the Department of Defense (DoD) High Performance Computing and Modernization Program (HPCMP) announced on Dec. 4. The Maui center, through the Air Force Research Laboratory, is a Distributed Center for HPCMP, providing a combination of the most advanced IMB SP scalable parallel processor capability and unique local expertise in image processing. Over 500 DoD HPCMP users are also supported by MHPCC, including four DoD Challenge Projects that are anticipated to use up to one million node hours of computing time through September 1998. MHPCC currently supports an additional 1,000 users from other government, commercial and academic organizations. It is a member of the National Science Foundation's National Computational Science Alliance, a partnership of U.S. universities and research institutions working to prototype the computational information infrastructure of the next century. MHPCC was founded in 1993 under a cooperative agreement between UNM and the Air Force Research Laboratory. The center is administered by UNM as a unit of the High Performance Computing and Education Research Center (HPCERC), one of UNM's four strategic research centers that is committed to providing scientific and technical leadership in high performance computing and communications. The Albuquerque High Performance Computing Center (AHPCC), another unit of the HPCERC, is establishing a 128-node IBM SP system to help support UNM and MHPCC high performance computing efforts.
###
RSS