Computers developed by the Array Processor Elements (APE) project were introduced to the US during a meeting, called Supercomputers for Science across the Atlantic, which was held on 19 and 20 May by the Italian Embassy in Washington.
APE is a European project that began in 1980 at Italy's INFN and that also involves DESY and the University of Paris-Sud. This was the first time that these European supercomputing technologies have been discussed alongside those from America and Japan in such a broad context.
The meeting dealt with the results achieved in the development of powerful supercomputers optimized for theoretical physics calculations, and their possible advantages in other scientific and technological areas. In particular, Array Processor Experiment/Next (apeNEXT) was introduced. This is the latest generation of the special-purpose high-performance computers developed by the APE collaboration, and it has been realized in conjunction with the Italian company Eurotech. At the symposium, equivalent projects to apeNEXT were also discussed, such as the American QCDOC (see CERN Courier September 2005 p17), and similar systems that have been developed by Japanese researchers.
These powerful supercomputers have been conceived as a response to the complex calculation requirements of theoretical physicists. However, they can also be used in other scientific and technological fields, such as meteorology, geophysics, proteomics and other studies of biological systems.
Author:
Compiled by Hannelore Hämmerle and Nicole Crémel