You are here: silicon.com > Hardware > Servers

Servers

Swedes plump for Itanium

Super computing

Tags: sweden, servers, itanium, hp

By Stephen Shankland

Published: 14 April 2003 10:12 BST

Hewlett-Packard has sold 90 dual-processor Itanium 2 machines to the Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden's largest engineering school, for use in a wide variety of intense calculation tasks.

The institute purchased 74 rx2600 dual-processor servers and 16 zx6000 dual-processor workstations, HP said Friday. They will be used at the ParallelDatorCentrum, a computing centre funded chiefly by the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing, to tackle problems in areas ranging from life sciences to astrophysics. The institute did not release how much it paid for the machines but calculations show that they would cost at least $1.3m on the market.

The 90-computer cluster is expected to be running by this summer but within a year the institute expects to triple its computing capacity with additional HP computers. In addition, the cluster will be linked into Sweden's national 'grid' for scientific computing, one of many networks of shared computers that collectively tackle even larger computing problems.

HP helped design Intel's Itanium processor family, a high-end product that first came out in 2001. Intel hopes Itanium will push aside IBM's Power processors and Sun Microsystems' UltraSparc processors.

Market researcher Gartner asserts that by the end of 2003, Itanium servers will be mature enough for databases - the data-storage task that's at the heart of business computing. Thus far, Itanium systems have been most widely used in clusters of smaller machines interlinked for high-performance technical computing jobs.

On Thursday, researchers at the US-based National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure announced full Itanium 2 support for its software, which is designed to make it less difficult to set up Linux-based supercomputer clusters.

In 2002, HP was the top seller in the $4.7bn market for high-performance technical computers. However, No. 2 IBM's share of that market grew while HP's share shrank.

Stephen Shankland writes for CNET News.com.

  1. Zones
  2. Management
  3. Networks
  4. Software
  5. IT Services
  6. Hardware
  1. Verticals
  2. Public Sector
  3. Financial Services
  4. Retail & Leisure

  • Jobs
SYSTEMS ADMINISTRATOR - APPLE MAC & OS X DESKTOP SUPPORT - Cambridge, South East

SYSTEMS ADMINISTRATOR - APPLE MAC & OS X DESKTOP SUPPORT - Cambridge, South East The European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) is a non-profit academic ...

Systems Administrator (London Knowledge Lab)

You will need experience in server management and maintaining a Content Management System, access to networked services and the desktop machines used ...

C++/C# - Mid-Level high performance real-time software- London

A financial software house are looking for an excellent C#/C++ developer and pre-sales engineer to work on their high frequency market data system. ...

CIO50 2008
The silicon.com CIO50 2008 profiles the most influential and innovative tech chiefs in the UK across all industries and organisation size, from the biggest FTSE100 companies to high growth dot-com start ups and the public sector. The list was voted on by the UK CIO community and a panel of experts. Find out more in our latest special report.





Quick Sitemap Links: