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On 2 October 2002, SCD will take delivery of Phase 2 of NCAR's Advanced Research Computing System (ARCS). The delivery will add a complete new IBM system, called bluesky, to the SCD computational environment. The bluesky system will have a peak computational capacity exceeding 6.3 teraflops and 21 terabytes of disk. Combined with blackforest and other SCD supercomputers, bluesky will bring the total peak computation capacity of NCAR's supercomputing facility to nearly 9 teraflops.
2001 expansion: 2.0 teraflops
In the fall of 2001, UCAR awarded to IBM the three-year ARCS contract. The contract has a two-year extension option, which provides a phased introduction of new computer equipment and interconnect technologies into the computational environment managed by SCD.
Phase 1 of ARCS augmented the existing IBM SP blackforest system by more than doubling its computational capacity, from 0.9 to 2.0 peak teraflops, and increased disk storage capacity to 12.5 terabytes. The blackforest system is comprised of 315 Winterhawk-2 and three Nighthawk-2 nodes.
The Winterhawk-2 nodes have four processors and the Nighthawk-2 nodes have 16 processors. All 1308 blackforest processors are IBM's POWER3-II processors, with a 375 megahertz clock, and with a capability of 4 floating point operations per clock tick. Thus each processor has a peak computation rate of 1.5 gigaflops. All nodes of the blackforest system are interconnected by IBM's TBMX switch fabric.
2002 expansion: 6.3 teraflops
The bluesky system will introduce IBM's next-generation POWER4 processor. As with the POWER3-II processors, the POWER4 has a capability of 4 floating point operations per clock tick; but the POWER4 runs at a substantially faster clock speed of 1.3 gigahertz. Thus each POWER4 processor has a peak computation rate of 5.2 gigaflops.
The bluesky system will be comprised of 38 Regatta-H Turbo frames, each with 32 POWER4 processors. Thus the bluesky system will have a total of 1216 POWER4 processors and peak computation rate of 6.323 teraflops.
The bluesky system passed its Live Test Demonstration on 19 September 2002. For a story and photos, see "ARCS bluesky system passes live test demonstration."
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