European, American and Japanese supercomputing compared

Ape computers will be introduced in the USA on May 19th and 20th during the meeting "Supercomputer for Science across the Atlantic" that will be held by the Italian Embassy in Washington.

The congress will deal with the results reached in the development of powerful supercomputers optimized for theoretical physics calculations and their possible advantages in other scientific and technological areas. It will be the first time that these European supercomputing technologies will be discussed together with the American and the Japanese ones, in a large context that involves not only the insiders.

In particular, the Italian Embassy will introduce to the American research community ApeNext (Array Processor Experiment/Next) the forefront supercomputer, result of the collaboration between the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (Infn) and eminent European research centres, realized in collaboration with the Italian company Eurotech. The symposium will deal also with equivalent projects to ApeNext, such as the American QcdOC developed by the Columbia University in collaboration with Ibm, and with similar systems realized by Japanese researchers.

These powerful supercomputers have been conceived to response to the complex calculation requirements of theoretical physicists and can find appliance in other scientific and technological fields, such as meteorology, geophysics, proteomics and other studies of biological systems.

For the Italian part the attendees will be Raffaele Tripicccione, spokesman of Ape project, Federico Rapuano, spokesman of Ape project within Infn, and Giampiero Tecchiolli, technical director of Exadron Italia and counsellor of Eurotech group. Among the numerous foreigner attendees, we mention here Norman Christ, spokesman of QcdOC project and Junichiro Makino, of Tokyo University, spokesman of Grape project.