Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center adds AlphaServer GS1280 system

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This purchase of the hp AlphaServer GS1280 system was made possible by a National Institutes of Health $1.3 million grant. The exceptional memory bandwidth of the new EV7-based AlphaServer systems, along with their "shared memory" architecture, offer powerful advantages for many scientific applications.

The new system will complement LeMieux, PSC's 3,000-processor terascale AlphaServer computing system running the hp Tru64 UNIX operating system and AlphaServer SC software -- the most powerful non-military research system in the United States committed solely to public research. The AlphaServer GS1280 system's shared-memory architecture allows each processor equal access to all of the memory available on the entire system, a capability particularly well-suited to such biomedical applications as protein simulations and genome sequencing. Moreover, the EV7-based systems' memory bandwidth-- the speed at which data is transferred between the processor hardware and random access memory-- is five to ten times greater than competitive products.