UCAR Buys HP Exemplar System For Weather And Climate Prediction

Contact also:
Kathy Sowards
Hewlett-Packard
Richardson, TX 75080
Telephone: 972-497-3061
E-mail: kathys@convex.com

BOULDER--The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) has signed a contract with the Hewlett-Packard (HP) Company to purchase an HP Exemplar X-
Class system. The purchase is part of a joint research and development project between the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and HP's Convex Division, located in Richardson, Texas.

During the project, NCAR and HP expect to develop the expertise and tools needed to utilize distributed shared-memory systems, such as the Exemplar, for numerical computer models employed in climate and weather prediction. The X-Class is HP's fourth-generation system based on the shared-memory architecture, called CC-NUMA (cache-coherent, non-uniform memory access). The Exemplar X-Class system to be installed at NCAR will have 64 processors and a peak speed of 46 gigaflops, or 46 billion floating point operations per second.

"The Exemplar is an intriguing next step in our effort to stay abreast of new architectures and new techniques," says Bill Buzbee, head of NCAR's Scientific Computing Division. Toward this end NCAR has worked closely over the past eight years with a variety of vendors, including Thinking Machines, IBM, Cray Research, and Cray Computer.

NCAR is procuring the HP Exemplar system under the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Scientific and Engineering Workstation Procurement (SEWP) program, which is open to NASA, NASA contractors, federal agencies, and federal agency contractors.

According to Buzbee, there is no relation between this research project and NCAR's procurement of a high-performance supercomputer dedicated to large, long-running climate models.

Hewlett Packard is a leading global manufacturer of computing, communications, and measurement products and services. NCAR is managed by UCAR under sponsorship by the National Science Foundation. UCAR is a consortium of 62 North American universities offering the Ph.D. in atmospheric or related sciences.
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Find this press release on the World Wide Web at http://www.ucar.edu/ucargen/press/exemplar.html

Additional information about the Exemplar system is available at http://www.hp.com/go/techservers