Compaq Wins Supercomputer Contract, But Is It Enough?
R. Krause - August 25, 2000

Event Summary

Compaq Computer Corporation and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) in Pittsburgh, PA announced that the National Science Foundation (NSF) in Arlington, VA has selected them to build and manage the world's largest supercomputer to offer scientists access to a wide range of non-military, scientific applications. The contract, valued at an initial $36 million for hardware, software and services, will be managed for NSF by PSC, with first delivery of systems expected by November 2000.Based on Compaq's AlphaServer SC architecture, the supercomputer will consist of 682 quad-processor Compaq AlphaServer systems with a total of 2,728 processors that will deliver peak computing power of greater than six trillion floating point operations per second (TeraFLOPS). The system will run Compaq's Tru64 UNIX operating system with 2,728 gigabytes of memory (1 gigabyte per CPU) and 50 terabytes of storage.Under terms of a joint agreement between Compaq and PSC, Compaq will provide the hardware, software, performance and benchmarking activities while PSC will do the porting, tuning and development of efficient parallel applications.This supercomputer system will allow NSF to establish a single, new terascale computing system to enable U.S. researchers in all science and engineering disciplines to gain access to leading-edge computing capabilities to look at such things as the structure and dynamics of proteins useful in drug design, storm-scale weather forecasting, and the modeling of earthquakes and global climate change.Background note: The Alpha chip and architecture was designed by Digital Equipment Corporation, which was acquired by Compaq in 1998. Market Impact..