NEWS BRIEFS
Maui, HAWAII — The Maui High Performance Computing Center (MHPCC) announced that following the installation of IBM’s newest SP technology, it has more than doubled its peak computing capacity. This upgrade involves 80 nodes of IBM’s newest SP 4-way Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) technology, code-named “Winterhawk II,” which replaced all of MHPCC’s existing IBM POWER2 systems and is operational now. The peak theoretical computational capability of MHPCC’s upgraded systems amount to 480 gigaflops (480 billion calculations per second), making MHPCC one of the largest computing systems within the Department of Defense (DoD) research community. “Clearly, this more powerful system will help our military maintain its technological superiority in the 21st century,” said Gene Bal, Director of MHPCC.
The upgrade took place in two phases. The first phase started July 17 and replaced 96 IBM POWER2 nodes with 48 IBM SP 4-way SMP nodes. Each SMP node has four IBM POWER3 (375MHz) processors, with 2 gigabytes of memory per node, and 36 gigabytes of disk space. Phase two started July 24 and added an additional 32 IBM SP 4-way SMP nodes, replacing the remaining IBM POWER2 technology. Funding for this acquisition came from the DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) Office and amounted to approximately $3.4 M.
“This latest acquisition enables MHPCC to provide DoD researchers with the newest high performance computing technology to support their warfighting requirements,” said Gene Bal. “MHPCC is well positioned to take a leadership role in providing high performance computing technology to Hawaii-based DoD organizations, as well as to the DoD community at large.”
“There is an increasing need for quick turn-round times for research, development, test, and evaluation (RDT&E) activities by DoD researchers,” said Cray Henry, Director of the DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program. “The additional capability and increased performance to be deployed at MHPCC will provide DoD Challenge Projects, our most demanding and highest priority computational projects, with the ability to solve whole new classes of problems and provide much improved turn-around times.” MHPCC is one of the HPC Centers within the DoD HPCMP that hosts several DoD Challenge Projects each year.
“MHPCC’s newest systems demonstrate clearly that IBM’s SP is significantly advancing the boundaries of computing,” said Mike Kerr, Vice President of Products, IBM Web Server unit. “The SP’s unmatched performance and scalability enable it to tackle even the most difficult scientific and technical challenges.”
MHPCC is currently ranked among the Top 100 most powerful supercomputer facilities in the world. MHPCC provides DoD, government, private industry, and academic users with access to leading edge, high performance technology.
MHPCC is a center of the University of New Mexico established through a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory’s Directed Energy Directorate. MHPCC is a Distributed Center of the DoD HPCMP, a SuperNode of the National Science Foundation’s National Computational Science Alliance, and a member of Hawaii’s growing science and technology community.
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