PALO ALTO, Calif. and PITTSBURGH, Nov 14, 2002 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- HP (NYSE:HPQ) and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) today announced they have formed a strategic alliance to demonstrate the potential of the National Science Foundation's extensible TeraGrid.

HP will add a cluster of HP Itanium(R) 2-based systems running Linux to PSC's computing environment, and PSC will participate in HP's worldwide grid program. PSC also will join the Gelato Federation, an HP-sponsored worldwide consortium focused on enabling open source Linux-based Itanium computing solutions. Membership in Gelato is awaiting approval from the organization's council.

Through their collaboration, PSC and HP expect to further the TeraGrid goals of enabling scalable, open source, commodity computing on IA-64 and Linux to address real-world problems. The added HP Itanium 2-based system cluster will complement LeMieux, PSC's six teraflop Tru64 Unix(R) AlphaServer supercomputer, the most capable unclassified system in the United States.

The TeraGrid is expected to provide the nation's fastest and most powerful computing grid, with the goal of demonstrating grid services by running key applications by 2004. By connecting LeMieux, PSC will expand the heterogeneous computing potential of the TeraGrid, with the addition of HP's Itanium 2-based systems.

Through its worldwide grid program, HP relates to grid participants worldwide and has internal grid investments with nodes in Bristol, England; Palo Alto, Calif.; Nashua, N.H, Houston and other locations. HP also is a founding sponsor of the Gelato Federation, http://www.gelato.org. PSC will bring its experience in grid computing middleware, applications and highest performing computing and communications to the Gelato effort.

HP will collaborate with PSC as early adopters and leaders in grid computing by:

-- participating in selected major grid projects;
-- running meaningful benchmarks, helping to scale up performance and capacity; and
-- understanding how to evolve grids to utility computing.

PSC also plans to use HP's Itanium 2-based systems running Linux for future high-performance computing needs.

The alliance will use HP equipment, which will be installed at PSC. In addition, HP engineers and researchers, both from the High-Performance Technical Computing (HPTC) Division as well as from HP Labs, will work with PSC personnel to run tests and realistic benchmarks to help ensure successful elaboration of the TeraGrid.

PSC will port and tune key applications to HP's Itanium 2-based systems running Linux. These activities will be performed in the context of PSC's membership in the Gelato Federation. This collaboration builds on well-established and successful relations with HP University Relations, the HP HPTC product divisions, pre-merger Compaq and going back to joint agreements between PSC and Digital.