On November 16, 2003, the Top 500 list of fastest supercomputers in the world was released. The new Hewlett-Packard (HP) supercomputer that was recently installed at the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) in Richland, Washington, was ranked number 5 in the top 500 list. The ranking of top supercomputers is based on their performance running a benchmark called Linpack, which is a method to measure a machine's ability to solve a set of dense linear equations. The new 11.8 teraflop HP system at the EMSL consists of nearly 2,000 1.5 GHz Intel® Itanium®-2 processors. The EMSL is a National Scientific User Facility located at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The new HP system was specifically designed for users seeking large-scale environmental, biological, and chemical science computational capabilities. Allocations of time on the HP system are therefore granted in large blocks to multi-institutional research teams on a competitive proposal basis. Users interested in requesting time on the new HP system must submit a peer-reviewable proposal through a process outlined at http://www.emsl.pnl.gov/using-emsl/. Further information on the EMSL is available at http://www.emsl.pnl.gov/.

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11/26/03