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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration
is using a powerful hp AlphaServer SC supercomputer
for climate research in environmental issues such as
global warming. |
Computer Sciences Corporation installed the
hp AlphaServer SC45 supercomputer at the NASA Center for Computational
Sciences at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt,
Md., in the first stage of a two-year NASA contract. The system,
running the Tru64 UNIX operating system, includes more than
500 Alpha 1-GHz processors.
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| This fall, the AlphaServer
supercomputer will be expanded to more than 1,300 processors with
the addition of more than 800 1.25 GHz Alpha processors. When fully
deployed, the AlphaServer SC45 system will deliver peak performance
of 3.2 TeraOPS and have 8 Terabytes of HP StorageWorks™ Fibre
Channel™-based storage. HP Services will support the entire
installation to ensure the highest levels of system availability.
In addition, CSC has installed a 32-processor hp AlphaServer
SC45 system at Columbia University in New York, for complementary
environmental research at the Goddard Institute of Space Studies.
The announcement further strengthens HP's position as the leader
in the high-performance technical computing marketplace. According
to industry research group International Data Corp., the combined
market share of HP and Compaq represented 41.5 percent of the $5.06
billion high-performance computing market in 2001.
The HP supercomputer was chosen by NASA following a comprehensive
competitive proposal review that included a number of benchmark
tests, featuring the Aries atmospheric modeling and Poseidon oceanic
modeling codes. The hp AlphaServer SC45 system produced the largest
guaranteed throughput measurement in both tests. The HP system will
replace several Cray® supercomputers, including a Cray T3E system
that NASA has been using since 1997.
This latest use of AlphaServer systems further illustrates how
supercomputing technology is now influencing our day-to-day lives.
Another AlphaServer supercomputer developed and implemented by the
Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center in collaboration with HP (at the
time Compaq) with funding from the National Science Foundation provides
computational capability to scientists and engineers nationwide.
The system is used in many areas of research that have wide social
impact, including earthquake modeling, storm-scale weather forecasting,
global climate change, and protein genomics, modeling that is integral
to the development of new drug therapies. We invite you to learn
more about AlphaServer
SC systems.
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"This new 1.25 GHz HP AlphaServer SC45 supercomputer
will enable NASA to extract more information from space based
observations to make more accurate predictions of climate
on seasonal and multi-decade timescales."
Richard Rood
Acting Chief Earth and Space Data Computing Division
NASA/Goddard
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