Subject: P655 Announcement
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 10:03:40 -0400

Dear Researcher,

I am very pleased to announce that we have just completed the
acquisition of a new IBM supercomputer to augment the University's
scientific computing facilities. The new machine is an IBM p655
system with 48 Power4 processors. This system is intended to
replace the older IBM SP system, which will be taken out of production
in September. The new system offers at least 50% more computational
capacity than the SP and uses the same processor family and operating
system as our flagship p690 systems.

The new machine comprises six 8-processor nodes. The nodes are
powered by IBM RS6000 Power4 processors running at 1.1GHz with
2GB of main memory per processor. While these processors run
slightly slower than those in the p690 (1.3GHz), the new machine
provides twice as much memory per processor.

We expect the new system to come on-line for general production
use next month. As we get closer to that time we will provide
additional details regarding the configuration. At such time we
also plan to revalue our allocation units (SUs) to be normalized to
the p690, so that one SU will correspond to one processor hour
on that machine with a slightly reduced rate on the p655.

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to
contact me by email (glenn@bu.edu) or phone (617-353-1319).
As always, Kadin Tseng (kadin@bu.edu) or Doug Sondak (sondak@bu.edu)
can assist with any questions regarding programming, software packages
or other issues related to the use of the facilities.

Sincerely,

Glenn Bresnahan