Starting January 1997 there will be four parallel computing hardware systems on campus.

• SGI Power Challenge (http://www.eng.vt.edu/eng/computer/crunch.html), 4 CPUs, 640MB memory, 18GB disk.

• Intel Paragon, XP/S-7, 100 General Purpose nodes where each node has two Inteli860 XP processors one dedicated to applications and the other to message passing, 32 MB memory, performance rated at 100MFLOPS single precision and 75MFLOPS double precision.

• IBM SP2 (http://spider01.cc.vt.edu/), 2 wide nodes with 512MB memory and up to 13GB disk and 8 thin nodes with 128MB memory and up to 4GB disk; this will be upgraded with at least 4 more nodes late in 1996.

• CAVE SGI Power Onyx, 8CPU R10000, 1.5 GB memory, 4 GB disk, 3 Infinite Reality Boards with 2RM64/pipe.

Comment R.D.K (12/4/95): Future efforts will target the construction of a CAVE environment with the purchase of an SGI Power Onyx. This effort will be cost shared by Virginia Tech together with the submission of a proposal to the NSF Academic Research Infrastructure (ARI) Program. The present COE SGI Power Challenge is targeted for numerical simulations only, hence, a visual computing environment such as a CAVE will complement the existing resources. We are particularly interested in network links with existing resources both on- and off-campus. In particular we are interested in learning how to link the CAVE visual computing environment with our SGI Power Challenge and other parallel computing resources on campus to create a "realtime" visual computing environment using an advanced communications network on campus.