As many users in the NCAR community probably know, in August the Department of Commerce officially assigned a dumping margin of 454 percent for NEC supercomputers. On that same day, the U.S. Court of International Trade rejected NEC's claim that the Department of Commerce had prejudged the case.
As a result of these decisions and consistent with regulations from the Office of Management and Budget that all procurements be conducted to provide open and free competition to the maximum extent possible, NSF has informed UCAR that it cannot approve the award for the SX-4.
As users may also recall, as soon as the dumping investigation began in September 1996, SCD began preparing for the possibility that the SX-4 would never be available.
Thus, within the past year, we have installed a CRAY C90 and a CRAY J90se. Most important, we used our High Performance Computing and Communications funds to acquire a Hewlett-Packard SPP2000 so we can evaluate Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) architecture and expedite transition to it. That process will intensify and dominate much of our work in FY98.
Further, this technology looks promising. Staff in SCD's Computational Science Section (CSS) have achieved over 10 gigaflops with a spectral-element atmospheric model running on a 128-processor HP system in Dallas. Silicon Graphics has reported over 5 gigaflops for the MM5 climate model running on a 64-processor Origin2000.
Overall, SCD is in good shape and well positioned to move ahead. For example, our ensemble of the C90 and the J90se gives us compute capability comparable to any other U.S. supercomputer center. The T3D and SPP give us highly parallel capability. Our MSS is the envy of most centers. Users routinely comment on the quality of our documentation and service.
The bottom line: SCD is alive and well. And as CSS manager Steve Hammond reminds me almost daily, the question is not, "Will we switch to highly parallel, nonvector systems?" The question is, "When will we switch?"
The answer is ASAP. It will be a challenge and an opportunity.
