NCSA NEWS

NCSA showcased Intel's® new Itanium^TM architecture as a high-performance computing platform at the eXCHANGE, an event hosted by Intel to highlight how the business world is using Intel architectures to support ebusiness and the Internet economy.

	Intel Chairman Andy Grove (far left) talks with NCSA's Rob Pennington (right, facing away) at NCSA's eXCHANGE exhibit.

NCSA was one of more than 100 organizations that attended the event to demonstrate their successes using Intel products. The NCSA booth featured demonstrations of two codes that have already achieved top performance on the new Itanium architecture: Cactus, a multipurpose high-performance toolkit used in a variety of scientific and engineering disciplines; and sPPM (simplified Piecewise Parabolic Method), which is used primarily in astrophysics and defense applications. The NCSA cluster development team, led by Rob Pennington, set up a 16-processor cluster at the eXCHANGE, consisting of four four-processor Itanium systems. The cluster ran on 64-bit Linux and used Myricom's Myrinet to interconnect the machines.

About 1,100 leaders in business and technology attended the two-day event in October, and many of them made their way to the NCSA display to see how the center is utilizing commodity-based clusters for its community of academic and business researchers. Visitors to the NCSA booth included Intel Chairman Andy Grove, who was given a personal demo. Grove was so impressed with what he saw in the booth that he mentioned NCSA in his keynote address as one of the three organizations at eXCHANGE that had impressed him the most. Other visitors to the booth included Intel Executive Vice President Paul Otellini, and Intel Fellow Richard Wirt, who heads the Itanium software organization.

	NCSA leaders and users on the benefits of the Itanium architecture to the HPC community
	Real Video versions 5.0 and above: http://zuul.ncsa.uiuc.edu/arrott2/media/Itanium_50.ram
	G2 Stream: http://realvideo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Itanium_g2.ram
	Windows Media Player High-bandwidth Stream (300Kb/s): http://mediavectra.ncsa.uiuc.edu/asxfiles/Itanium.asx

Additional keynote addresses at the eXCHANGE were provided by industry leaders Carly Fiorina, president and CEO of Hewlett-Packard Corporation; Bill Gates, chairman and chief software architect of Microsoft Corporation; and John M. Thompson, vice chairman of IBM.

Intel and Pentium are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation.

Itanium is a trademark of Intel Corporation.

Access Online | Posted 10-24-2000