All the fun stuff seems to happen in the hallowed halls of academia. Research, invention, learning, sharing ideas, parties - kinda makes you yearn for younger days doesn't it? (Wait, maybe that's just me.) Out in the Midwestern U.S., the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) and SGI have put together a new cluster system using the Itanium-based Silicon Graphics 750 system. The system makes use of a whopping 146 processors and will allow Ohio researchers to study everything from quark-antiquark attraction and radiation transfer in astrophysical outflows to simulations of photosynthesis components and matter in the early universe. The latest Silicon Graphics 750 system has 292GB memory, 428GFLOPS peak performance for double-precision computations, and 856GFLOPS peak performance for single-precision computations. It follows the previous PIII Xeon cluster that was being used at OSC for the past 18 months. The old system will be divided into smaller clusters and cascaded to faculty as part of the Cluster Ohio Project grants awarded last month. The systems are linked together with the Myrinet-2000 interconnect for MPI traffic to form the clusters. Wonder how they keep the thing cool.