The university has purchased a 128 Intel Corp Itanium 2 processor Altix 3000 system to form the next phase of its Cosmos cosmology grid platform project to collaborate on research to model the history of the universe.

Mountain View, California-based SGI has a long-standing relationship with Cambridge University’s Cosmology Group, which is led by renowned physicist and author Professor Stephen Hawking, and has been working on the Cosmos project since 1997. The original Cosmos platform, a 32-way Origin 2000 server was later expanded with a 64-way Onyx server.

The new 128-way Altix 3000 was chosen for its scalable shared-memory performance, integrated shared file systems, and remote visualization capabilities, according to Paul Shellard, director of the Cosmos supercomputer.

Launched in January 2003, the Altix 3000 allows for fast development time scales and high productivity through its use of OpenMP, according to the company. OpenMP is an application programming interface that supports multi-platform shared-memory parallel programming in C/C++ and Fortran on all architectures, including Unix, Linux and Microsoft Corp’s Windows.

The Cosmos project’s Altix 3000 implementation also includes additional graphics equipment and an upgrade to its existing CXFS storage system, including a 2GB storage area network and 6TB SGI TP9400 RAID subsystem.

Educational establishments have become a core market for the Altix supercluster. Since its release it has been purchased by universities in Australia, Japan, Austria, Poland, Spain and Germany for such projects as bio-informatics, marine ecology research, earthquake research, and chemical, scientific, engineering and physics computation.

Cambridge is not the only UK university researching the origins of the universe. Earlier this year a consortium of universities including Oxford, Liverpool, Glasgow and University College London invested in a high-performance computing cluster from Dell Computer Corp to analyze the results of particle collision experiments, which could eventually reveal what occurred during the big bang.

Source: Computerwire