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NCSA Lauds Itanium Architecture at IDF Conferencereleased February 27, 2001
Contact SAN JOSE, CA — NCSA will spread the word about its new terascale Linux clusters and the value of Intel's new Itanium™ architecture at the Intel® Developer Forum (IDF) Conference, Feb. 26 - March 1 in San Jose, CA. On Feb. 27, Rob Pennington, head of NCSA's Computing and Communications division and the center's Linux cluster development efforts, will participate in a panel discussion addressing how NCSA users are taking advantage of Intel's new 64-bit Itanium architecture. All the panel participants will be end-users who are computing on the Itanium-based platform and seeing positive results. Pennington will talk about NCSA's efforts to port scientific codes to the Itanium architecture and early positive results running those codes on single-processor Itanium-based PCs and on prototype Itanium clusters. NCSA and a number of research groups have been working with Intel in collaboration with IBM and Myricom to port applications to the Itanium system, including MILC (for MIMD Lattice Computation by the MILC Consortium), sPPM (for simplified Piecewise Parabolic Method), and Cactus. Preliminary results running MILC show single-processor performance of more than 1 gigaflop on a prototype 800 MHz Itanium system. These results were computed by Steven Gottlieb of Indiana University. MILC is a code used by a nationwide group of physicists at nine academic institutions who study some of the most fundamental questions of the universe. The sPPM and Cactus codes have achieved performance in excess of 650 megaflops on a single processor prototype Itanium-based server running 64-bit Linux. sPPM was developed by Paul Woodward, a University of Minnesota researcher, and is used primarily in astrophysics and defense applications. Cactus, developed by Ed Seidel's research group at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, Germany, is a parallel toolkit used in astrophysics and several other scientific disciplines. "These early positive results confirm what we have been anticipating from the beginning: the Intel Itanium processor is going to be one of the key platforms in high-performance computing," said Pennington. NCSA recently announced plans to build a Linux cluster based on the Itanium architecture using 160 IBM eServer xSeries servers. That cluster will be capable of peak performance of 1 teraflop. Another Linux cluster installed in February 2001 uses the IBM eServer xSeries thin series and is based on Intel's Pentium® III architecture. That cluster will also be capable of 1 Tflop peak performance. For more information, see http://access.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Headlines/01Headlines/010116.IBM.html. In addition to the panel, Intel President and CEO Craig Barrett will talk about NCSA's success with the Itanium architecture during his Feb. 27 keynote address. The keynote will feature videos of computer simulations produced with sPPM and Cactus on Itanium machines. Pennington will also be on hand for the keynote to talk about scientific applications now running on NCSA's prototype Itanium-based Linux cluster. The Intel Developer Forum Conference is aimed at hardware and software developers and features more than 250 sessions and labs. For more information, see http://www.intel94.com/idf/index2.asp.
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