Two of the major Australian advanced computing associations have opted to use Compaq supercomputers in an attempt to fuel scientific research in all areas of science and engineering.

The Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC) and the Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing (VPAC) have recently signed deals with Compaq to secure a contract for continued service over three years.

The APAC deal will give the association a Compaq AlphaServer SC with more than 450 Alpha processors as well as system and development software. Compaq is also expected to help work with APAc partners provide solutions for Australian research, education and commercial organisations.

The APAC supercomputer will be housed at the association's national facility at the Australian National University and should be made available to researchers across the country. Areas of potential research will include chemistry, physics, environmental science, biotechnology, molecular modelling for new drugs and pattern discovery for fraud detection.

Meanwhile, VPAC's supercomputer solution will incorporate an AlphaServer SC with 128 Alpha processors.

However, VPAC's decision to select and implement a supercomputing solution was not an easy one. A number of strict criteria needed to be fulfilled in order for an implementation to be approved, particularly given the relatively short six month tender-to-installation period.

Professor Bill Appelbe, chief executive officer of VPAC, explained, "We went through an exhaustive competitive tender process, with an evaluation committee with both technical and user support experts."

"Compaq had the best combination of price/performance, reliability [and] installed base," explained Appelbe. "In addition, Compaq had the best offer on the table in terms of partnerships."

However, the issue that really swung the ball heavily into Compaq's court was knowing that it would be there in years to come.

Other supercomputing vendors have fallen on hard times, particularly with the advent less expensive clustering technologies. For instance, Cray, which also produces massively multiprocessor supercomputers, has had a chequered history and was sold off by Silicon Graphics last year to Tera Computer for a great deal less than SGI paid for it back in 1996.

Appelbe was quick to explain, "Purchasing a supercomputer... involves a bit of peering into a crystal ball. All vendors promise upgrade paths, but it takes a lot of technical skill and experience to be able to pick an architecture and vendor that are not going to be obsolete or out of business in a few years."

Another factor in VPAC's decision to adopt a Compaq solution was the speed of implementation. "Bids were received from all the major vendors," said Appelbe. "[But] we needed to be operational quickly (and we went from tender to purchase to full installation with 100-plus users in less than 6 months), and thus were not willing to purchase a system that could not be delivered on a tight timeframe."

Another unique aspect of Compaq's offering to VPAC was the ability to quadruple performance at a later stage by pushing the amount of CPUs in the system to its full complement of 512.

The new VPAC supercomputer now represents, according to Appelbe, a ten-fold increase in performance over "any existing installed general purpose HPC (high performance computing) system that is publically accessible in Victoria".

While the new system will be used to compute tasks that have been calculable through existing means, the supercomputer will be able to tackle much larger problems and complete them more quickly. "For example, we have commenced a Virtual Earth simulation project, that is projected to be capable of simulating in detail the evolution of the entire earth's continents," said Appelbe.

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