Finnish government lines up Linux in £3.1m deal

The Finnish Ministry of Education has decided to replace its existing Cray T3E computer with a supercomputer running Linux.

Professor Risto Numminen of the Helsinki University of Technology, said supercomputers used in research today are the prototypes of tomorrow's corporate mainframes.

The IBM RS/6000 SP will be used by the University to study complex calculations such as DNA structure. Paavo Ahonen, project manager, from the Computer Unit of the Finnish Ministry of Education said: "The supercomputer will be used in research activities such as material physics, computational fluid dynamics and quantum chemistry."

However, Professor Numminen believes it is only a matter of time before they are being implemented in the corporate environment. "Although these machines are currently being used for performing complex calculations in many areas of research, the need for improved performance and speed means the business community will have to look at it," he said.

IBM claimed the machine is the most powerful of its kind in Europe. It has a processing power of 200 gigaflops, combined with 64 gigabytes of memory and half a terabyte of disk space in eight standalone units, and can run on AIX 4.3.3 - IBM's version of the Linux operating system.

Eric Klein, senior analyst at Giga, said supercomputing is a part of emerging trend in the mainframe sector, particularly as increasing numbers of companies outsource their hardware.

"The trend of placing hardware outside the business location will increase and it will be concentrated in large data centres worldwide. These centres will be operated by the supercomputers. Universities and research centres use these devices as they need machines with large calculation capacities, but this will be increasingly be the case in the private sector too."

The full implementation at the Finnish Ministry will be completed by 2002.