Intel
To provide PROCESSORS FROM Intel® itanium™ processor FAMILY as part of
scientific research into the origin of mass
London,
UK, Sept 24, 2001 – Intel today announced it will provide processors from the
Intel® Itanium™ processor family to support a new scientific research project
aimed at investigating the origin of mass.
Intel will donate computing equipment valued at approximately $1.5M USD
to the project, which will be built over the next three years by CERN, the
European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva.
Intel’s
contribution to the CERN openlab is a long-term commitment and will include
access to its extensive resources and network in the world of IT as well as its
expertise in high-performance computing.
“Intel
is proud to be a key contributor to such an important project for the
advancement of scientific research”, commented Steve Chase, director of
Intel’s Business and Communication Solutions Group for Europe, the Middle East
and Africa (EMEA). “The Intel Itanium architecture provides outstanding
performance for demanding high performance computing applications combined with
unprecedented flexibility in terms of operating systems and hardware platforms
with clustered solutions and multiprocessor systems. "
CERN’s
project involves building the most powerful particle accelerator ever, the Large
Hadron Collider (LHC), in order to conduct experiments to investigate the origin
of mass, one of the most fundamental questions of science. In order to process
the huge amount of data produced by the experiments, CERN will rely on a grid
processing resource where many small, powerful computers are linked together.
Grid technologies link data, computers and storage into a single virtual
laboratory by providing the protocols, services and software to enable flexible,
controlled resource sharing on a large scale.
CERN’s
giant DataGrid will consist of an interconnected worldwide grid of tens of
thousands of computers and storage devices. Thousands of scientists from
universities around the world will collaborate to analyse the data collected.
Manuel
Delfino, leader of CERN’s Information Technology Division said: “We are
faced with a ground-breaking challenge to deal with the largest data-intensive
computing application of this decade. We need to combine high performance with
reliability in a solution that is able to grow to match the requirements of
leading-edge scientific research. The Intel Itanium processor has already
demonstrated outstanding results in tests performed at CERN.”
“This
represents a new approach to scientific research”, said Chase. “The move
from supercomputing to distributed computing opens access to scientific research
data and creates a much broader community, enabling wider collaboration. Grid
technologies open new and tremendous opportunities by making powerful computing
resources available to every scientist without regard to location or available
resources"
The
Intel Itanium architecture design enables breakthrough capabilities in
processing terabytes of data at high speeds and processing complex computations.
Intel Itanium
processor-based solutions are providing the highest levels of floating-point
performance for complex, numerical-intensive applications -- surpassing many of
the best RISC-based results and benchmarks to date. The Intel Itanium
processor’s floating-point engine currently enables up
to 6.4 billion
operations per second and includes increased system memory bandwidth.
This
announcement is the third this year highlighting Intel’s commitment and
involvement in supporting scientific research advancement with its Intel Itanium
processor.
In
August Intel announced its contribution to the ‘TeraGrid’ project in the
United States, to build one of the world’s largest distributed scientific
computing system to help researchers across the United States collect and
analyse data to help solve some of the most complex scientific problems in
diverse areas such as molecular modelling for disease detection, cures and drug
discovery, automobile crash simulations and alternative energy sources.
The
TeraGrid will link computers powered by more than 3,300 Intel® Itanium™
processors and will be capable of more than 13.6 trillion calculations per
second (13.6 teraflops).
In
June Moscow State University also announced its use of Itanium-based systems in
order to power its chemical cybernetics laboratory. Research conducted at the
chemical cybernetics laboratory (CCL) of the Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU)
chemistry department has used the Itanium processor for tasks involving enormous
amounts of computations and an immense data flow.
