The future of Germany’s ambitious Suprenum parallel supercomputer project is still far from certain, with the government dragging its heels about continued support for the project (CI No 1,531), but at the end of September, the University of Erlangen was kitted out with a second parallel processing complex which, according to Suprenum GmbH, Bonn, Germany, passed the mandatory acceptance tests with 98.6% availability. The university, Computerwoche reports, is using the newly acquired computing complex to convert its existing Suprenum development system into a two cluster system – that is two sets of 16 vector processing nodes, each rated at up to 20 MFLOPS, and four housekeeping nodes for disk control, diagnostics and communications. Each node consists of a Weitek Corp floating point chip set, with 8Mb of memory using non-volatile random-access memories made in the UK, and custom gate arrays, all under the control of a Motorola 68020 and mounted on a ceramic substrate measuring 8.8 by 18.9. With one computer and 20 processors, says Suprenum, the university can now manage up to 400m computer operations per second. The system is being installed at Erlangen for the development of system and application software, for example for quantum chemistry and the like, and for further research into communications within parallel computer architectures.
