Bulletin Spring‧Summer 1998

The Fastest Supercomputer in Hang Kong is Now at CUHK T he University procured a supercomputer last November to meet the needs of research projects requiring high computational power. The SGI (Silicon Graphics, Inc.)-made system, 0rigin2000, is currently the fastest super-computer in Hong Kong. It has 24 CPUs w i th a total theoretical peak computational power of 9.36 x 10 9 floating-point operations per second, which is about the same as 100 personal computers with Intel Pentium 200 CPUs. 0rigm2000 has about 200 GB of disk storage and 6.5 GB of main memory, equivalent to about 200 personal computers, each with 32M RAM. The system was ranked 426th in the World-wide Top 500 Supercomputer List which came out in June 1997. 0rigin2000 was selected jointly by the Computer Services Centre and the Institute of Mathematical Sciences through a stringent evaluation and tenderin g exercise. The target of the evaluation exercise was a system that can be used w i t h minimal effort by first-time users of a supercomputer, but tha t at the same time meets the requirements of experienced supercomputer users who look for computational power more than user-friendliness . Ha v i ng evaluated each proposal ver y carefully w i t h objective bench-marking tools, the selection team decided Origin2000 would best suit the University's needs. Currently over 10 research projects at the University have switched to the 0rigm2000 system, many of wh i c h are related to f l u id mechanics, simulation, multi-dimension data analysis, computationa l statistics, quantum chemistry, optimization, an d data-mining. So far its users have all praised it for its speed and convenience of use. Prof. Chu Ming Chung of the Department of Physics said that the supercomputer had sped up calculations by 20 times, while Dr. Steve Au-yeung of the Department of Chemistry said calculations which formerly took two months could now be completed within days. Associate director of the Institut e of Mathematical Sciences, Prof. Raymond H.F. Chan, pointed out that in the competitive world of technological research, efficient and time- saving supercomputer systems will help improve research quality, attract better graduate student s as well as more research funding. With the return of Ho ng Kong to Chinese sovereignty, the volume of data that requires handling in many research projects is expanding. Research on geoinformation science, for example, will now include data on south China besides Hong Kong. Supercomputers are an indispensable research tool in both the academic and industrial sectors i n the US and Europe. Although they are not as widely used locally, the installation of Origin2000 w i l l no doubt give impetus to their popularization in Hong Kong. Chinese University Bulletin Spring • Summer 1998 26