More than 600 scientists and researchers throughout Australia now have access to the most powerful supercomputer on the continent, as the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC) starts its deployment of an SGI Altix supercomputer powered by 1,680 Intel Itanium 2 processors. "The Australian Government has committed to fully support Australian science," said Bob Bishop, chairman and CEO, SGI. "By supporting the APAC installation of a world-class Altix supercomputer from SGI, Australian scientists have access to powerful tools for simulation, innovation and discovery. This is an important step for the country to remain competitive in the 21st Century." Housed in the APAC National Facility at the Australian National University, Canberra, the SGI system will assist researchers to make new discoveries in areas such as the environment, bioinformatics, astronomy, chemistry and materials science, according to Professor John O'Callaghan, executive director, APAC. The APAC system is ranked in the June 2005 Top 500 list as the world's 26th fastest supercomputer. It joins other world-class SGI Altix systems whose ability to leverage the SGI NUMAflex shared-memory architecture places them among the fastest computers on the planet. These include: NASA's 10,240-processor Columbia system; Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute's 2,048-processor supercomputer; the National Center for Supercomputing Applications' 1,024-processor Cobalt system; and a 3,328-processor Altix supercomputer soon to be deployed at Germany's Leibniz Rechenzentrum Computing Center. SGI Altix systems are increasingly proving essential for running complex scientific applications, due in large part to SGI's fourth-generation NUMAflex architecture. This unique global shared-memory architecture enables researchers to hold large data sets entirely in memory, allowing for faster and more interactive data analysis, and resulting in more incisive conclusions.