SGI Origin 2000 - Ute
SGI
In use: June 1, 1998 - July 15, 2002
Production use
Peak teraflops: 0.06
Processors: 128
Clock speed: 0.25GHz
Memory (terabytes): 0.02TB
Electrical power consumption: 51.10 kW
In December 1997, after a lengthy evaluation of domestic supercomputer technology by NCAR’s Scientific Computing Division and representatives from other divisions, NCAR decided to invest the FY1998 Climate Simulation Laboratory (CSL) computational budget in a Silicon Graphics Origin2000.
The system was delivered on May 18, 1998, and made available to six CSL projects on June 24. Ute had 128 superscalar processors, each processor with a theoretical peak performance of 500 megaflops, so the system had a theoretical peak of 64 gigaflops. Users typically achieved 5-10% of peak performance.
Ute had 16 gigabytes of distributed global shared memory, 455 gigabytes of disk space, and HIPPI connectivity to the Mass Storage System. It ran the IRIX operating system and supported Fortran 90, Fortran 77, C, and C++ compilers. Ute was especially suited for long-running, highly parallel jobs.
By the end of FY1998, system utilization on Ute exceeded 80%. This high level of utilization was exceptional and unexpected for a distributed shared-memory architecture. Ute was decommissioned on July 15, 2002.