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Technology Stocks : Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PCSS who wrote (2048)	10/28/2002 12:00:07 PM
From: PCSS	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4345

U.S. Department of Energy Selects HP for ASCI PathForward Scalable Rendering Program; Technology Targeted at Building Large Graphics Visualization Clusters PALO ALTO, Calif., Oct 28, 2002 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- HP (HPQ) today announced that it has been chosen by the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to develop and demonstrate a graphics visualization system capable of rendering and displaying the very large (terascale) data sets produced by complex computer simulations. NNSA's Advanced Simulation and Computing (formerly Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative or "ASCI") is tasked with developing the computing infrastructure necessary to carry out NNSA's role of nuclear stockpile stewardship. One of the initiative's pressing needs is to facilitate better understanding by scientists of the enormous amounts of data produced by simulations involving supercomputers using hundreds and thousands of processors. Perceiving graphics visualization as the best way to enhance comprehension, the ASCI PathForward committee in cooperation with ASCI's Visual Interactive Environment for Weapon Simulation (VIEWS) committee has awarded a three-year contract to HP to develop advanced high-performance visualization technology based on scalable visualization clusters. Under the agreement, HP will develop hardware and software to demonstrate the feasibility of near-real-time visualization of very large data sets, using clusters of workstations running the Linux operating system and equipped with standard graphics cards and network compositing adapters. The work will be done at HP's High Performance Technical Computing laboratory in Nashua, N.H. DOE laboratories will collaborate with HP and its subcontractors in a shared-cost arrangement. "This award is an example of cooperation between public agencies and industry to address issues of both governmental and commercial interest," said Allen McPherson of NNSA's Los Alamos National Laboratory. "A visualization system for large data sets that is cost-effective and practical to maintain is required by NNSA's ASCI program." "HP is pleased to be working with scientific computing researchers to accept the challenge of developing large-scale graphics visualization clusters that will have value for national defense as well as for our customers in industries such as the life sciences, energy and aerospace," said Winston Prather, vice president, HP High Performance Technical Computing Division. In addition to its usage by the NNSA, the visualization clusters would be useful to better understand complex simulations such as molecular modeling in life sciences research, reservoir modeling for oil and gas exploration in the energy industry and computational fluid dynamics studies for vehicle and engine design in the aerospace and automotive industries. Key to the effort is new HP compositor technology developed at HP's High Performance Technical Computing Labs. An image compositor allows image data to be distributed among a number of workstations, each working in parallel to render a portion of the image. Using a high-bandwidth, addressable image network, the HP compositor then recombines the contributions of each workstation into a single, viewable image. The ASCI VIEWS project is designed to establish the feasibility of very large visualization clusters, built from standard components and scalable over a wide range of performance and resolution levels.