ASCI White's 28 trucks traveled cross-country, from Poughkeepsie, New York to Livermore, California, in several trips, over multiple routes. Along the way they quietly passed through cities and towns where technological cousins are making impressions in a variety of fields, from physics research to the improvement of airline ticketing.
We begin at ASCI White's destination, near San Francisco, where other RS/6000 SP projects are already underway. From San Francisco, we travel south, to San Diego, then eastward, to Albuquerque, Chicago, and Pittsburgh. From Pennsylvania we head south briefly, to Oak Ridge, Tennessee and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and then head north once more, to Washington, DC, New York City and finally to IBM's facility in Poughkeepsie, where Deep Computing research is underway, and RS/6000 SP servers are manufactured. |
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The delivery and installation of ASCI White, the world's fastest supercomputer, represents the completion of the third stage-of a planned five stages-in the Department of Energy's Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative and the close of a multiyear bidding and construction process. But within the context of IBM supercomputing initiatives, it is merely a stepping stone, the entry point to advances with far-reaching applications in business and research.
Late in June of this year, IBM announced the debut of a commercial version of the RS/6000 SP supercomputer that is ASCI White. This will allow companies to take advantage of the RS/6000 SP's unprecedented speed and power-in ASCI White's case the ability to perform 12.28 trillion calculations per second-to run more efficient Internet operations and data centers and to consolidate servers.
Not far from the Livermore Labs, in Berkeley, California, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a site for university and government research, has agreed to buy an IBM supercomputer capable of completing 3.5 trillion calculations a second-the most powerful machine handling unclassified data in the world.
Expected to be in place by the end of this year, the Berkeley computer will be used for a range of research, including the study of climate and the human genome. |
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The National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) in association with the San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego are supporting highest-performance computing resources. They have installed a 1,152 processor IBM RS/6000 SP, the most powerful computer available to the US academic community and currently the 10th most powerful computer in the world. (ASCI White, of course, is made up of 8,192 individual microprocessors.)
Some of the exciting projects underway at SDSC include:
- analysis and prediction of storms (a full automated, scalable parallel storm and meso-scale prediction system in three dimensions)
- brain mapping / computational anatomy (mapping of two three dimensional MRI brain images one of a patient and the other of a "standard" brain, mapping from one to another)
- cardiac fluid dynamics (a three dimensional computer model of the heart, its valves, and the nearby vessels of the cardiovascular system used to model the mechanical principles governing cardia physiology in health and disease)
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