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Intel and IBM to build new supercomputer
Friday, August 10 2001
by Matthew Clark


Intel and IBM announced that they will help to build a new supercomputer, known
as "TeraGrid", expected to be the largest of its kind in the world. 

According to Intel the TeraGrid will link computers powered by more than 3,300
Intel Itanium processors. The company says the giant computer will be capable of
more than 13.6 trillion calculations per second (13.6 teraflops) and will have
the ability to store, access and share more than 450 trillion bytes of
information.



The new machine will be more than a thousand times faster than IBM's Deep Blue
supercomputer, which defeated chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.



The distributed scientific computing system is part of a USD53 million award by
the United States National Science Foundation to four different facilities to
address complex scientific research by creating what is known as a distributed
terascale facility. 



The organisations involved want the TeraGrid to be accessible to researchers
across the United States so that they can more quickly analyse, simulate and help
solve some of the most complex scientific problems.



Examples of research areas include molecular modeling for disease detection,
cures and drug discovery, automobile crash simulations, research on alternative
energy sources, and climate and atmospheric simulations for more accurate weather
predictions.



Dan Reed, director for NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications),
said the system would be connected through a high-speed optical network, provided
by Qwest, which will be the fastest open research network in the world. 



Most of the supercomputer will be located at the NCSA at the University of
Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. NCSA has three partners which will also deploy
systems including the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of
California, San Diego, Argonne National Laboratory in suburban Chicago, and the
California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.



The supercomputer is expected to be available in 2002 and will include Intel's
next-generation Itanium processor, codenamed McKinley, which is also due in
2002.



The NCSA is at 
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/.