Compaq gone fission for French supercomputer

Compaq has built Europe's largest supercomputer to simulate the testing of nuclear weapons for the French government.

The system is a key part of France's ongoing mission to replace its controversial South Pacific weapons-testing programme with wholly simulated tests.

Compaq claims the machine is seven times more powerful than any of Europe's existing computers, and is capable of five trillion calculations per second. It would take a technician with a handheld calculator working day and night 150,000 years to do the same amount of work.

Compaq has managed to build the system, based on 2,560 of its Alpha processors, in less than a year, a key part of the reason it was awarded the contract.

The French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) said Compaq had the most scalable and manageable supercomputer technology, and had delivered ahead of schedule.

Compaq is dubbing the computer the "Tera", because of its ability to deliver five teraflops of computing power. It uses 640 Alpha servers clustered using a purpose-built high-performance switch.

The system also relies on 50 terabytes of RAM, arranged on a Storage Area Network using Compaq's Storageworks EVA architecture.

However, even this isn't enough for the French government. Compaq is contractually bound to replace this machine with a twelve teraflop supercomputer within the next five years, to further improve performance.

Despite its size the computer is dwarfed by current projects in the US. Compaq itself is building a six teraflop supercomputer in the US, whereas a similar projects by IBM to simulate nuclear weapons explosions works at 12 teraflops.

IBM is also working on a system, dubbed Blue Gene, to run at 200 teraflops, or 200 trillion operations per second.