New Mexico’s Supercomputer Completes Historic Test Run

By DE Editors

New Mexico’s new supercomputer, said to be the third fastest in the world, is reported by the University of New Mexico (UNM; Albuquerque, NM) as completing its first scientific application test run by an outside user.

In a weather forecast project, Professor Joseph Galewsky of UNM tracked how a hypothetical winter storm would play out over nearly three weeks in an area that would cover much of the Western Hemisphere. The test run was accomplished in three hours and nine minutes, about a month after the supercomputer, named Encanto, arrived in New Mexico.

Galewsky’s project, which is part of the ongoing acceptance testing overseen by the New Mexico Department of Information Technology, used 4,050 of the 14,336 Intel Xeon processor cores on Encanto. That’s about 28 percent of the total computing power on the world’s third fastest machine, according to the UNM release.

The machine is scheduled for final installation and acceptance by the state in June 2008. The state purchased Encanto in 2007 to boost economic development and education efforts in New Mexico. The $11 million machine, approved by the 2007 Legislature, is projected to operate at 172 trillion calculations per second. That massive computing power can allow companies to develop new products, governments to model better traffic flows, and allows researchers like Galewsky to better predict the weather.

The University of New Mexico, New Mexico State University, and New Mexico Tech have signed on as partners in the

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