Intel's Itanium to power research computing system

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By Douglas F. Gray

(IDG) -- Intel Corp.'s Itanium and McKinley processors will be used in a distributed scientific computing system allowing researchers to analyze, simulate and help solve complex scientific problems, Intel announced.

The "TeraGrid" computing system will link more than 3,300 Itanium processors and will be capable of more than 13.6 million calculations per second, as well as having the ability to store, access and share more than 450T bytes of information, the company said in a statement.

The system, which is expected to be completed next year, will consist of clustered servers from IBM Corp. running the Linux operating system and will be connected by a high-speed optical network from Qwest Communications International Inc.

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TeraGrid is part of a $53 million award by the National Science Foundation to address complex scientific research, including 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, Intel said.

The largest portion of the system's computing power will be at the National Center for Computing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. The NCSA has three partners that also will participate in the project: the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, the Argonne National Laboratory in suburban Chicago, and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.