New 6-teraflop supercomputer unveiled

From...

By Todd R. Weiss

(IDG) -- A 6-teraflop Terascale supercomputer that will be used for severe-weather forecasting, earthquake modeling and other projects was unveiled Monday at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC).

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The Terascale Computing System was built through a joint effort by the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University and Westinghouse Electric Co. at the PSC and was developed with Compaq Computer Corp., using funding from the National Science Foundation.

The machine was built from 3,000 Compaq Alpha EV68 microprocessors and is housed in 750 four-processor AlphaServer systems running Tru64 Unix.

The machine has 6 teraflops of processing power, 3TB of memory, and high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnections.

The project began last October with the installation of a 256-processor prototype system at the PSC computer room, located in the Westinghouse Energy Center in Monroeville, Pa.