Fujitsu Ltd’s Fujitsu Laboratories has loaned an AP1000 parallel machine to the Parallel Computing Center at Imperial College, London which was opened this week as part of a joint venture between the firm and the college. It results from Fujitsu’s desire to expand research within Europe into parallel computing. The Centre will focus on software and applications development in parallel computing in an effort to extract generic knowledge on the subject from the research, which will focus in particular on studies in the arena of multimedia and virtual reality. Fujitsu said that it is making no prior claims on the software developed on the machine, but users are to share their results with other AP1000 users for research purposes. The machine has been given to the college until 1997 with the possibility to negotiate for a longer loan period; it has 128 Sparc processors each with 16Mb memory, connected via three networks; it also has 32 Distributed Disk and Video options and 16 Numeric Accelerator Cards each incorporating Fujitsu’s microVP vector processor. The machine will be connected onto SuperJanet via Imperial College so that it will be accessible for use throughout Europe.
