ENGINEERING

FAIRBANKS, AK -- Installation was completed Saturday at the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center (ARSC) of the first Cray SV1ex to be installed at a supercomputing facility. This enhancement is the last step in an ongoing upgrade of ARSC's Cray SV1 supercomputer. "We are excited and pleased to be the first to install this state-of-the-art technology," said ARSC Director Frank Williams. "Our staff and researchers are already testing the computer's improved capabilities, and are ready to use this technology to advance their scientific applications." The final step in this upgrade involved the installation of new advanced memory that offers twice the system memory bandwidth of the SV1. In addition, the memory will provide, for the first time on an SV1 architecture, a Solid State Disk capability. ARSC installed the Cray SV1, called Chilkoot, in September of 2000 as part of an acquisition that included several upgrades to the computer. The SV1ex will be used by researchers from the University of Alaska, the Department of Defense and other ARSC affiliates. "The faster memory will not only improve users' individual performance, but the throughput of the system as a whole," said ARSC Research Liaison Guy Robinson. "The availability of the SSD filesystem will greatly benefit users whose programs require large volumes of data." ARSC provides computational resources in science and engineering to researchers within the University of Alaska and other academic institutions as well as the Department of Defense and other government agencies. ARSC, located on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus, provides computational resources to scientists and engineers within the University, the Department of Defense and other academic and government agencies. Founded in 1993, the center supports a 32-processor Cray SV1ex, a 272-processor Cray T3E and a 200-processor IBM SP. In addition, the center supports two StorageTek robotic tape silos and a variety of networking and visualization hardware and software. The ARSC staff includes experts in high performance computing, networking, visualization and data storage resources. For additional information visit www.arsc.edu