In 2002, a prototype of the new 8.3TF Linux-based supercomputer from Hewlett Packard will be delivered to PNNL. The installation will consist of 32 Longs Peak nodes with prototype McKinley processors. This prototype system will have 64 processors corresponding to roughly 256GF of computational power and 256GB of total memory. Half of the nodes will each have 200MB/sec sustained I/O rate to 256GB of local storage. The HP Longs Peak nodes include the HP zx1 chipset, which provides four independent PCI-X busses, one at 1GB/sec. The HP zx1 scalable memory expander provides 12.8GB/s bandwidth to main memory. The system also will include the Quadrics QSNet1/Elan3 interconnect, the lowest latency interconnect available at this time.

Software developers in EMSL will use the prototype system to tune NWChem, a PNNL-developed award-winning computational chemistry code designed from scratch to be scaleable and have high performance on massively parallel computers, and other EMSL user codes.

Phase I of the production system will be installed in 2002, and will contain 128 Longs Peak nodes with 256 production-McKinley processors, corresponding to 1TF of computational power, and 572GB of memory. The Phase I system will be based off of 1.0-GHz McKinley processors, just like the prototype system. Each processor has 3MB of on-chip L2 cache and is expected to be capable of sustaining 86 percent of peak on a matrix multiply (DGEMM). The Phase-I system will have similar features to the prototype in terms of interconnect and memory bandwidth. This system will have a 27TB Storage Area Network (SAN) and independent host-bus adaptors for each of the 128 nodes.

The final production system will be delivered in 2003. At that time, HP will deliver an additional 566 nodes with Intel Madison processors. The final Phase2 system will have a total of 1400 IA-64 processors with 1.8TB of memory and 53TB of SAN-based global storage with an additional 117TB of usable local storage divided among the nodes. The final system will include the QSNet2/Elan4 interconnect from Quadrics operating on an independent 1GB/sec PCIX2 bus. The system will be fully integrated with the Phase-I system and available to external users by 2003.

The system being delivered by HP has unique features that significantly distinguish it from other Linux computer systems based on commodity chips. It is the additional chip set coupled to the Intel processors that enables the HP solution to deliver such a high percentage of peak performance.

"Because HP co-developed the Itanium™ architecture with Intel, our engineers have intimate knowledge of the processor," said Barry Crume, business product manager for Itanium workstations, HP Technical Computing Division. "Using our expertise with multiple operating systems and technical and business applications, we then whittled away the unessential to deliver a chipset that is as lean and powerful as a finely tuned race car."

Hewlett-Packard systems represents nearly one-third of the TOP500 supercomputers worldwide as ranked on the TOP500 list (http://www.top500.org).

"Today's announcement shows how HP has worked to help accelerate the shift from proprietary platforms to open architectures, which provide increased scalability, speed and functionality at a lower cost," said Rich DeMillo, vice president and chief technology officer at HP. "This supercomputer is another validation of HP's service-centric technology vision, exemplifies the power and benefits inherent in the Itanium architecture and Linux, and clearly illustrates that there is more than one top player in the supercomputing market."

EMSL (http://www.emsl.pnl.gov) is a national user facility sponsored by the Office of Biological and Environmental Research in DOE's Office of Science. The Molecular Science Computing Facility (http://www.emsl.pnl.gov:2080/capabs/mscf/index.html) includes a molecular science software suite, graphics and visualization laboratory, and high-performance computing center available to outside scientists through a competitive proposal process.

Hewlett-Packard Company - a leading global provider of computing and imaging solutions and services - is focused on making technology and its benefits accessible to all. HP had a total revenue of $45.2 billion in its 2001 fiscal year. Information about HP and its products can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.hp.com.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is a DOE research facility and delivers breakthrough science and technology in the areas of environment, energy, health, fundamental sciences and national security. Battelle, based in Columbus, Ohio, has operated the laboratory for DOE since 1965. Business inquiries on PNNL research and technologies should be directed to 1-888-375-PNNL or e-mail: .