SGI PowerChallenge XL (winterpark): 1997–1999
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The SGI PowerChallenge XL was installed at NCAR on 10 January 1997. Named "winterpark," it was acquired jointly by NCAR's Scientific Computing Division (SCD) and the Climate and Global Dynamics Division. Half its resources were allocated to the general user community and the other half to CGD.
Winterpark served as a proof of concept for the "data park" idea. Historically, data analysis had been done on the NCAR supercomputers because those were the only machines with the requisite disk space, memory, and high-speed connections to the Mass Storage System (MSS). The data park project was intended to offload data analysis from the supercomputers and also to provide a more suitable and capable environment for data analysis.
Winterpark had 8 processors, moderate computational capabilities, a reasonable (but not large) physical memory (1,024 megabytes), large amounts of online disk space (72 gigabytes), and a high-speed connection to the NCAR Mass Storage System.
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Since the IRIX operating system running on winterpark did not provide resource-management capabilities familiar to UNICOS users (for example, user-specific limits on interactive and batch process CPU time and memory usage), system-administrator restrictions could not be imposed on the use of winterpark and its resources. Users were encouraged to adopt a "good neighbor policy."
Winterpark was decommissioned on 3 May 1999 and replaced by a 16-processor SGI Origin2000 named "dataproc."