IBM Corp has won another high profile supercomputer contract at the US Department of Energy. The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is to take an IBM RS/6000 SP system for its next supercomputer. It will pay $33m, making the transaction the largest single procurement in its 63-year history.
The system will be installed in two phases. Phase 1 begins in June, with 304 of the recently announced two-CPU 64-bit Power3 SMP nodes – the first implementation of the technology. In all, Phase 1 will have 512 CPUs for scientific computing, 256Gb memory and 10Tb of disk storage. IBM says peak performance will be 410 gigaflops. The second phase is planned for no later than December 2000, and will add 152 16-CPU Power3+ SMP nodes, using a future enhanced Power3 processor. The entire system will have 2,048 processors dedicated to scientific computing, with a peak performance of over three teraflops.
NERSC will work with IBM to develop computer benchmarks to measure the effectiveness of the SP in production environments. The Labs currently own seven supercomputers, the largest a 640 processor Cray T3E-900. IBM has a similar contract with the National Center for Environmental Prediction.
