Special Features:
ENGINEERING INSTITUTE ADDS TO
NATIONAL GRID
The Royal Institute of Technology, which is Sweden's largest engineering
school, has bought 90 dual-processor Itanium 2 machines from Hewlett-Packard.
The institute expects to use these machines for intensive calulation and
problem-solving assignments. The price for all these servers is calculated to
be over $1 million.
The servers will be used at the ParallelDatorCentrum, a computing center
funded chiefly by the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing, to tackle
problems in areas ranging from life sciences to astrophysics. The institute
purchased 74 rx2600 dual-processor servers and 16 zx6000 dual-processor
workstations.
The institute expects to triple its computing capacity with additional HP
computers. In addition, the cluster will be linked into Sweden's national
"grid" for scientific computing, one of many networks of shared computers that
collectively tackle even larger computing problems. The cluster is expected to
be running by the summer.
Intel hopes Itanium will push aside IBM's Power processors and Sun
Microsystems' UltraSparc processors. HP helped design Intel's Itanium
processor family, a high-end product that first came out in 2001.
Thus far, Itanium systems have been most widely used in clusters of smaller
machines interlinked for high-performance technical computing jobs. Market
researcher Gartner says that by the end of 2003, Itanium servers will be
mature enough for databases -- the data-storage task that's at the heart of
business computing.
At the U.S.-based National Partnership for Advanced Computational
Infrastructure, researchers announced full Itanium 2 support for its software,
which is designed to make it less difficult to set up Linux-based
supercomputer clusters.
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