Supercomputing center adds more power

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications, one of the larger buyers of supercomputers, said Tuesday that it has purchased an SGI supercomputer called Cobalt that will contain 1,024 Itanium 2 processors, three terabytes of memory and 370 terabytes of disk storage when completely operational.

With a peak performance of more than 6 teraflops, Cobalt will bring the total computing power at the NCSA to more than 35 teraflops and raise disk storage to 750 terabytes, according to the center. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory recently erected an Itanium 2 supercomputer with 4,096 processors. In March, the NCSA said it had an open proposal for a supercomputer but did not say which companies were in the running for the contract.