IBM Corp has shipped its first Rios RISC-based SP1 parallel processor, and the machine has gone to Cornell University, New York State, which has a $12.3m grant from the New York State Urban Development Corp for high-performance computing research. Cornell will use part of the funding to buy the $3m 64-processor machine, which is to be expanded to 512 CPUs when that configuration becomes available next year. IBM reckons the planned 512-CPU model will do over 100 GFLOPS. IBM and Cornell have teamed up to develop scientific and technical applications for the SP1 in fields such as fluid dynamics, plasma physics, ground wat-er and air pollution analysis, drug design, ozone mapping and seismic analysis.
