The Dutch knowledge economy gets a boost from Watergraafsmeer in Amsterdam. Supercomputer Teras (Greek for monster) owned by Sara Computing and Networking Services will be made three times faster. If the upgrade is ready in September the calculating beast with its computing power of three trillion calculations per second (3.2 teraflop) will probably belong to the fifty fastest in the world.
The upgrade is important to the approximately two-hundred users at universities and scientific institutes. The most avid consumers are chemists, mathematicians (for example from the UT, ed.), and meteorologists. The latter can use it to test climate models, like the effect of oceanic currents.
Teras has already won its spurs in scientific research. With 600,000 calculating hours the largest protein database in the world was set up a short while ago. Amongst others Organon and the Centre for Molecular and Biomolecular Informatics (CMBI) of Nijmegen University participated in this project.
The upgrade of the national supercomputer has been subsidised by the foundation National Computer Facilities (NCF), a subsection of the science foundation NWO. In total the computer will cost 14 million euros. For the technical people: the upgrade is being realised with an additional SGI Altix 3000-system with 416 Intel Itanium 2 processors and 832 Gbytes memory. The Altix-system consists of nodes of 64 processors with shared-memory, running a standard Linux operating system.
By the way, the American government has set as an aim that supercomputers should be able to handle over a thousand billion calculations per second in 2010. According to staff member Bert van Corler of Sara there are no plans to provide Teras with speech technology because the computer is almost exclusively used at a distance. The lovers of the rebellious HAL 9000 computer from KubrickÆs classic movie æ2001 û A Space OdysseyÆ will have to be patient a little while longer before their dreams come to life.
HOP, Onno van Buuren/ ed. UT-Nieuws
