Hewlett-Packard Co has stepped up its Precision Architecture RISC alliance with Convex Computer Corp, announcing a partnership with the Richardson, Texas minisupercomputer builder and the US National Center for Supercomputing Applications built on a cluster of its workstations and a Convex supercomputer. The cluster, installed at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign centre, will be used by researchers for scalable application development. The workstations will also be used in the research and development of distributed computing environments, distributed and parallel, and multimedia applications. Hewlett is putting up over $1m of equipment including 18 desktop and deskside HP Apollo 9000 Series 700 workstations and multimedia software. The cluster will be tightly integrated with a Convex C3880 supercomputer creating a Meta Series using a high-performance interconnect and Convex software to gen erate the highest levels of applic ation throughput. The cluster is a major component of the centre’s metacomputer, a collection of sup ercomputers, workstations, data storage and advanced imaging resources and is intended to spur efforts to build a scalable metacompu ter based on RISC technologies. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the other three National Science Foundation centres – Cornell Theory Center, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and San Diego Supercomputer Center – are extending the metacomputer concept to the National MetaCenter, a synthesis of the intellectual and computing resources of the four.
