Hewlett-Packard Systems Arrive at PSC

By Michael Schneider

The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) has received two GS1280 AlphaServers from Hewlett-Packard (HP), each housing 16 of the newest generation of the powerful Alpha processor, the EV7. HP introduced the new servers Jan. 20.

The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center is a joint effort of the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University together with Westinghouse Electric Company.

PSC’s two new systems—dubbed Jonas and Rachel, for Jonas Salk and Rachel Carson—are among the first GS1280s to roll out of HP production. Each has 32 gigabytes of shared memory, and each represents the first phase of what eventually will be two 128-processor GS1280 systems at PSC. One of the systems, Jonas, will be dedicated to biomedical research, and the other, Rachel, will support National Science Foundation science and engineering projects.

Named by PSC staff to honor significant Pittsburgh contributions to science, Rachel and Jonas will complement LeMieux, PSC’s terascale system—the most powerful system in the United States committed to public research.

The new systems have a shared memory architecture and exceptional “memory bandwidth”—the speed at which data transfers between hardware memory and the processor. Benchmark tests have demonstrated that the GS1280 memory bandwidth is five to 10 times greater than comparable systems.

Carson is recognized for jump-starting modern environmentalism with Silent Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1962) about the hazards of insecticides, and Salk, working at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School, is credited with developing the first polio vaccine.