Good News about National High Performance Computers News Update from http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/hpc/facilities/newmic.html Developments in HPC We are pleased to see that it has been announced that a sum of 10m pounds sterling has been included in the UK science budget in the 1997/8 financial year planning figures for capital expenditure on high performance computing. The money is intended for the purchase of one or more major new systems to support research council's programmes needing access to the most powerful computers available. We are currently holding discussions on future programme arrangements with sister councils, and intend to start the process to select a new system or systems to come into service in early 1997. Some current systems are heavily overloaded and, as it will be over a year before a new system can be brought into full production service, ABHPC have approved interim investment in current systems to provide some additional capacity in the short to medium term. The Cray T3D at EPCC will be upgraded to 512 processors - this will provide significant extra parallel capacity, and will also provide a new capability to run jobs of 512 PEs and 32 GBytes of memory. The upgrade is scheduled for the end of February. The Cray Y-MP8 at RAL will be replaced by a J90 system. The peak performance of the processors is slower than the Y-MP8, but the new system will have higher throughput and lower running costs. This is an interim service to provide additional capacity until the new system(s) is fully in production - the longer-term requirement for the service will then be reviewed. EPSRC will be discussing with RAL and JISC the possibility of providing increased Class 3 time on this system. Further information on the procurement will be published on our WWW page at URL http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/hpc/ and on the newsgroup uk.org.epsrc.hpc.news. If you would like to discuss anything raised by this message, please mail our discussion list at uk.org.epsrc.hpc.discussion. Rob Whetnall Alison Wall High Performance Computing Group EPSRC Please send comments/queries to Alison Wall - email: alison.wall@rl.ac.uk