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Rice University Terascale Cluster to be Built with HP's Intel Itanium 2-based Systems Running Linux
Cluster Expected to Rank as Texas' Fastest Academic Supercomputer
PALO ALTO, Calif., and HOUSTON, Nov. 19, 2002
HP
(NYSE:HPQ) and Rice University's Computer and Information Technology
Institute (CITI) today announced their plans to build Texas' fastest
academic supercomputer, the Rice Terascale Cluster (RTC). Scheduled to
come online early next year, RTC is to be built on HP's Intel® Itanium® 2-based workstations and servers.
RTC is expected to be the first computer at a Texas university with
a peak performance of 1 teraflop, or 1 trillion floating-point
operations per second. More than 30 researchers from fields as diverse
as biochemistry, political science, physics and computational
engineering have already booked time on RTC.
HP plans for the RTC to be composed of 132 HP Workstations zx6000 and four HP
Servers rx5670. The systems, to be interconnected via a high-speed,
low-latency communications system, will use the 64-bit Intel Itanium 2
processor and extend its capabilities with the performance and cost
advantages of the HP Chipset zx1.
"Since RTC is a shared resource, it has to have the flexibility to
meet a diverse set of high-performance computing needs -- be they
computationally demanding, data intensive or mathematically complex,"
said Moshe Vardi, director, CITI. "HP's innovative design gave us the
features we need today -- visualization capabilities, a large parallel
file server and a shared front-end -- and it should make it easy and
inexpensive for us to expand RTC in the future."
"Through this agreement, HP
intends to provide Rice University's CITI with the performance and
flexibility needed to advance their research programs," said Chris
Christopher, vice president and general manager, HP Workstation Business Unit. "CITI's decision to use HP's Itanium 2-based systems running Linux is further proof of HP's ability to provide cutting-edge technology infrastructure to higher education institutions."
The supercomputer is designed to use Red Hat Linux Advanced
Workstation and Server operating systems, Myricom Myrinet high-speed
interconnect, NVIDIA graphics cards, Foundry switches and HP StorageWorks VA 7400 disk array and Disk System 2405 storage devices.
Almost a quarter of Rice's faculty are members of CITI. The
institute brings together researchers, both in and outside Rice, to
develop new computing technologies that solve tangible problems in
society. These problems are wide-ranging but have two things in common:
they require experts from very different fields to work closely, and
they are incredibly complex -- both to study and to solve.
In addition to the broad range of interdisciplinary research to be
conducted by CITI, the RTC also should enable Rice University to
continue its contributions of compiler technology and tools to the
Linux open source community.
About Rice University
Rice University is consistently ranked one of America's best
teaching and research universities. It is distinguished by its:
size-2,700 undergraduates and 1,700 graduate students; selectivity-10
applicants for each place in the freshman class; resources-an
undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio of 6-to-1, and the fifth largest
endowment per student among American universities; residential college
system, which builds communities that are both close-knit and diverse;
and collaborative culture, which crosses disciplines, integrates
teaching and research, and intermingles undergraduate and graduate work.
About HP
HP is a leading global provider
of products, technologies, solutions and services to consumers and
businesses. The company's offerings span IT infrastructure, personal
computing and access devices, global services and imaging and printing. HP completed its merger transaction involving Compaq Computer Corporation on May 3, 2002. More information about HP is available at http://www.hp.com.
Intel and Itanium are U.S. registered trademarks of Intel Corp.
This
news release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks,
uncertainties and assumptions. All statements other than statements of
historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking
statements. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include the
possibility that the market for the sale of certain products and
services may not develop as expected; that development and performance
of these products and services may not proceed as planned; and other
risks that are described from time to time in HP's Securities and Exchange Commission reports, including but not limited to HP's quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended July 31, 2002 and reports filed subsequent to HP's
annual report on Form 10-K, as amended on January 30, 2002, for the
fiscal year ended October 31, 2001. If any of these risks or
uncertainties materializes or any of these assumptions proves
incorrect, HP's results could differ materially from HP's expectations in these statements. HP assumes no obligation and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements.
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