Compusys 64-bit solution more than pie in the sky

Matthias Steinmetz, director at The Astrophysical Institute Potsdam (AIP) says, "Computational Astrophysics as a field of research has become equal in size to traditional Observational and Theoretical Astrophysics and the three fields have at last converged to bring clarity among those trying to explain the mysteries of the universe."

One limitation of whole-universe supercomputer simulations is that they have failed to resolve the small-scale structure of the universe, individual galaxy clusters and galaxies. Frustratingly, the computational power simply hasn't been there and explanations of the universe have remained incomplete.

"The alternative is clusters of computers of standard design which are configured to perform many tasks in parallel, like a true parallel high-performance computer" explains Matthias. "The performance is the same as a traditional supercomputer, but at a tenth of the cost."

"We chose Compusys because of their track record of building supercomputers from commodity equipment controlled by the Open Source Linux operating system, which has become the de facto standard supercomputer operating system. We are not novices and are therefore well aware of the issues with commodity 64-bit computing. We had to be sure that the company we chose was capable of making such a high profile solution perform for us. Compusys clearly was."

The Institute is also one of Germany's main nodes of the "Virtual Observatory", a network of astrophysical organisations around the world that interconnects large scale electronic data archives using GRID technology.