Breaking News - Operating Systems
& Software:
Platform Grid Solution Powers PNNL
Supercomputer
Platform Computing Inc. announced that its Grid computing software will be
used to power the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Pacific Northwest National
Laboratory (PNNL) $24.5 million, 11.4-teraflop HP supercomputer. Originally
announced by HP in April 2002, the PNNL project is expected to create one of
the world's most powerful Linux-based supercomputers, allowing researchers to
apply an advanced computational infrastructure to address "Grand Challenge"
scale environmental research problems.
To enable reliable, on-demand access to enterprise compute resources,
Platform LSF, the foundation of Platform's Grid solutions, will balance
workload across the new HP supercomputer, which consists of 1,900 of the
next generation of Intel Itanium&trad; Family Processors. With its new
high performance, Grid-enabled architecture, Platform LSF provides the
highest levels of performance through its robust, scalable architecture and
reliable advanced scheduling capabilities, making it ideal for PNNL's
highly parallel, high performance computing (HPC) environment. Scheduled to
be fully operational in 2003, the PNNL supercomputer is expected to be more
than 45 times faster, have 50 times more disk space and have 30 times more
memory than PNNL's current computer, which was one of the world's most
powerful when installed in 1997.
"With Platform's distributed computing software, we can manage our
computing resources as if they were a single system environment, increasing
the accuracy and effectiveness of the scientific programs that run on
them," said Scott Studham, operations technical group leader for the
Molecular Science Computing Facility at PNNL. "Platform LSF's open
architecture integrated easily with our existing computing infrastructure,
providing a seamless transition for scientists."
"PNNL is setting a new standard for Linux high performance computing," said
Rene Copeland, president, Platform Federal. "PNNL is poised to take full
advantage of all the computing power in its new supercomputer to perform
research computations faster and more reliably than ever before. PNNL's
deployment of Platform LSF 5 provides a strong, stable, and scalable
foundation for this incredibly compute-intensive work, enabling them to
accelerate environmental research."
The HP supercomputer is being installed at the Molecular Science Computing
Facility within the William R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences
Laboratory (EMSL), a DOE scientific user facility at PNNL. DOE's Office of
Science sponsors EMSL through the Biological and Environmental Research
program. The first 1-teraflop phase of the supercomputer arrived in summer
2002. The second phase will be delivered in March 2003.
Scientists will be granted access to the supercomputer based on a
competitive proposal process and will use it to study complex chemical
problems that form the basis for new discoveries in areas such as
subsurface transport, material design, atmospheric chemistry, combustion
and life sciences. In addition, they will apply the supercomputer to study
geochemistry and biochemistry; radioactive and chemical waste detection,
storage and management; systems biology; genomics; proteomics; materials
science; fundamental studies in chemistry and computer science; and
catalysis.
Platform's government customers include the U.S. Department of Defense, the
Department of Energy, NASA, and other civilian and intelligence agencies.
Platform recently announced significant customer engagements with the
Department of Energy (DOE)'s Brookhaven National Laboratory, the Stanford
Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), and the Texas Advanced Computing Center
(TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin. With over 10 years experience
in HPC, Platform deploys distributed and Grid computing software solutions
across the research and development, defense, life sciences, mechanical
design automation (MDA), and electronic design automation (EDA) industries.
For more information visit www.platform.com/federal.
About Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is a multiprogram DOE research
facility and delivers breakthrough science and technology in the areas of
environment, energy, health, fundamental sciences and national security.
Battelle, based in Columbus, Ohio, has operated the laboratory for DOE
since 1965. Business inquiries on PNNL research and technologies should be
directed to +1 888 375 PNNL or email inquiry@pnl.gov.
More information on EMSL is available at www.emsl.pnl.gov.
The Molecular Science Computing Facility is at
www.emsl.pnl.gov:2080/capabs/mscf/index.html.
About Platform Computing
Platform Computing provides distributed and Grid Computing solutions that
help enterprises effectively connect, measure, manage and optimize their
enterprise resources. Platform's integrated desktop to Grid software
solutions are used by over 1,500 customers worldwide in the financial
services, government, life sciences and manufacturing industries to deliver
higher quality products and services, improve business performance and
maximize the return on IT investments. Founded in 1992, Platform has
strategic relationships with Apple, Dell, HP, IBM, SAS and SGI, and the
industry's broadest application integration support.
www.platform.com
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