The Cold War arms race may be over but its legacy remains. Stockpiles of nuclear weapons require complex monitoring systems run by supercomputers to guarantee their safety. And a team of Irish engineers has just been contracted to help build the world's largest computer for the US Department of Energy.
The proposed supercomputer - a 30 TeraOPS system - codenamed "Q", is based on Compaq's AlphaServer systems running on the Unix operating system. It will consist of about 375 AlphaServer systems (approximately 12,000 Alpha processors) with EV68 Central Processing Units running in excess of 1,250 MHz on Compaq's Tru64 UNIX operating system.
In plain English, that means it will be capable of processing 30 trillion operations per second, according to Mr Mark Gantly, director of the high performance technical computing engineering team at Compaq in Galway.
"The standard number of processors in a commercial server is about four while this will require about 12,000 processors," says Mr Gantly. "We believe this will make Q the most powerful supercomputer in the world."
To generate this awesome processing power Q will be much bigger than normal computers and will consume some five megawatts of power, the equivalent of a small Irish town, says Mr Gantly.
"In physical terms some 375 computers, each about the size of a decent-sized fridge will be connected together," he says.
The contract for Compaq is worth $200 million (€232 million) with the computer being designed and constructed at different Compaq centres around the world. The investment at the Galway operation will be in the region of between $6 million to $8 million and will create an additional 15 jobs in the engineering team, says Mr Gantly.
The Galway team is responsible for building the AlphaServer SC, the super computer architecture that will be used to construct the Q system. "The computer will be used for the US Department of Energy's weapons stewardship programme and will manage stockpiles of nuclear weapons," he says. "It will test and model the behaviour of these weapons to guarantee the safety of the stockpiles."
The supercomputer will eventually be housed in a new strategic Computing Complex at the Los Alamos national laboratory in New Mexico, USA. But Q is only the latest in a run of success for the Compaq engineers in Galway. On August 3rd, the National Science Foundation selected Compaq and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Centre to build and manage another computer with almost 3,000 processors. This contract was worth $45 million. Earlier this year the team of Galway engineers began work on a contract for the largest and fastest supercomputer in Europe. This machine will be delivered to the French Atomic Energy Commission by 2002. A smaller version of Q, this supercomputer will ensure the safety of the French nuclear stockpile.
But according to Mr Gantly, supercomputers can be used for a range of different activities, including storm-scale weather forecasting, modelling of earthquakes and global climate change. Compaq's AlphaServers have also provided some of the computing power that drove the sequencing of the human genome to early completion, he adds.
The recent contract wins for Compaq's supercomputer group is leading expansion at Compaq's Galway engineering team.
"We are currently recruiting additional engineers to work on this project and expect to employ an additional 15 engineers to join our core team of 22 people," Mr said Gantly.
