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ARMONK, N.Y. -- IBM today announced that the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) purchased a new IBM supercomputer that will enable world-class research in areas including energy production and environmental quality modeling. The powerful new supercomputer will be used by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin (UT) to develop more environmentally-friendly oil drilling techniques. The new computing hardware installed includes an ultra-dense cluster of 32 IBM eServer(tm) p655 systems, each containing four IBM POWER4(tm) microprocessors. TACC also installed a 32-processor p690 eServer system with 128 gigabytes of memory for conducting simulations and analyses that required a large pool of shared memory. Coupled with TACC's first POWER4 system, there are 224 total POWER4 processors running the AIX 5L(tm) operating system and over 500 gigabytes of memory. The servers combined now make TACC's IBM supercomputer the most powerful academic computing system in the state of Texas. The POWER(tm) family of microprocessors is among the most widely used in the industry and can be found in Nintendo game consoles, Apple computers and some of the world's most powerful supercomputers and storage systems. "Our first IBM POWER4 system, with 64 processors, was installed at TACC just one year ago, and our computational users quickly appreciated its power," said Dr. Jay Boisseau, director of TACC. "We are very pleased to have been able to more than triple this system's capability to over one teraflops. The upgraded IBM supercomputer will enable our researchers to conduct more detailed simulations-more grid points or particles, and for longer simulation times-in important areas of science and engineering." Computational research at UT that will benefit from the new system in the modeling of surface and subsurface flows such as oil and gas. One major project involves a multidisciplinary research team headed by UT Professors Mary F. Wheeler and Paul Stoffa, who are developing a Web-based grid computing portal that will enable surface and subsurface flow codes and geophysical simulation codes on the IBM supercomputer to interact dynamically with each other and with real-time data collected by sensors in the field. "The new IBM system will enable us to conduct simulations that include data from real-time monitoring of surface flow conditions, which is essential in the development of optimal strategies for production from existing oil and natural gas reservoirs and also for understanding the flow and availability of groundwater in aquifers," said Prof. Wheeler. "The IBM eServer p655 and p690 systems provide the computational capabilities needed to help UT researchers produce realistic simulations and analyses in this important area," said Peter Ungaro, IBM vice president of supercomputing. The TACC supercomputer system will also be used for computational research in many other fields. TACC supports computational research in numerous disciplines including geophysics, astrophysics, space science, chemistry, biology, aerospace engineering, and mechanical engineering. Hundreds of researchers at UT and also at other U.S. universities, through TACC's membership in the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), will benefit from the installation of the new hardware. IBM is the leading vendor of supercomputers according to a recently released report from International Data Corporation on worldwide high performance technical computing segment revenue in the fourth quarter of 2002. In the quarter, IBM's revenue share of high performance computers was 36.7 percent, an 11.5 point jump from the previous-year's quarter, according to IDC. [1] IBM is also the number one supercomputing company, leading the independent TOP500 List of Supercomputers with the most total computing power, or teraflops.[2] IBM supercomputers are used in life sciences to explore genomic research, in automobile design to make cars safer, and in financial markets to optimize investment strategies. (1) Source: IDC's High Performance Technical Computer QView, Q4, 2003 (2) Source: TOP500 List of Supercomputers, November 2002, www.top500.org