HP gets Nasa uber-computer deal

Nasa has bought a supercomputer to research weather conditions on earth.

The US space agency has spent $17.5m on the giant machine from HP which will be based in Nasa's Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

The beast, officially called AlphaServer SC45 system, is running on the Tru64 Unix operating system and includes more than 500 Alpha 1Ghz processors. The machine will also use 8Tb of HP StorageWorks fibre-channel based storage, the company said.

The supercomputer will be expanded later this year to house more than 1,300 processors.

The AlphaServer will mainly be used for predicting major events which might affect the world's climate, such as volcanic eruptions.

The computer can also calculate any possible long-term rises in the earth's temperature or the direction of a hurricane. It will be linked to Nasa's weather satellites orbiting the earth.

The computer will be managed by Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) which will be working together with the Nasa scientists.

Bob Scudamore, vice president, CSC, said in a statement: "With this new technology in place, NASA scientists will be better able to understand the Earth's systems and improve predictions of climate, weather and natural hazards."