By Timothy Hurley
Advertiser Maui County Bureau
KIHEI, Maui — Fire crews battling forest fires will be among those who will benefit from a new Department of Defense supercomputer unveiled Friday at the Maui High Performance Computing Center.
The supercomputer, a 512-processor Linux cluster, is the largest of its kind in the world. It can process 478 billion calculations per second. It is part of a $15 million upgrade at the Kihei computing center, one of the world’s most powerful supercomputer facilities.
"It’s an awesome machine. It’s a beautiful machine,’’ said Frank Gilfeather, executive director of the High Performance Computing Education and Research Center, which administers the Maui site.
Gilfeather said the Linux system will allow researchers and others to link up to the Maui computer with desktop and portable machines running the Linux system.
A major use of the new computer will be military projects as well as other government jobs such as an assignment to construct weather forecasts to help combat forest fires. Officials said the computer will produce high-resolution simulations and models with highly localized forecasts. It will be able to predict such things as subtle variations in wind velocity and precipitation over distances as small as a mile. Fire managers linked to the site will be able to access the information in the field.
Other scheduled projects include academic investigations into hurricanes and tsunamis.
The new computer sits in a room the size of a basketball court but takes up only about 100 square feet.
While it is the world’s fastest computer of its kind now, it will be not be that way for long. A machine twice as powerful is being built at the University of Illinois.
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