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                                                            10 January 1993




                          SX-3/44 at Dorval Accepted 
     
          On  December 17 1992 the SX-3/44   installed   at   the    Dorval
     supercomputer  center completed the  last of  the  formal   acceptance
     requirements  and  was switched into operational mode. The machine  is
     now  the  main  production  system  used  for the support of   weather
     forecasting in Canada.
     
          The SX-3/44 is a 22 GFLOP vector  supercomputer  produced  by NEC
     Corporation of Japan. The Canadian   system, originally installed   in
     October    of 1991, consists of 4 vector processors, each with   a 5.5
     GFLOP  nominal  performance, 1 GByte of main memory, and 4 GBytes   of
     extended memory. Connected to the machine is a 200 GByte disk  farm of
     high performance parallel disks.
     
          Over  the  year  since the initial installation of  the   machine
     employees  of  Environment Canada, the machine's   major  client, have
     converted a large base of software from the proprietary Cray Operating
     System  to  run  under  the  UNIX  environment of the SX-3/44. At  the
     completion  of  the  conversion  efforts, the major application of the
     weather forecasting system, a finite  element based weather prediction
     code, runs in 1/3 of the elapsed time on a  single  processor  of  the
     SX-3/44 as it did on 4 processors of an XMP 4/16 EA machine. For  this
     application this shows an almost 12 times improvement  in  performance
     over the previous production machine.
     
          With the conversion effort complete, Environment Canada employees
     are now shifting their efforts to projects that will take advantage of
     the  increased performance of  the SX-3/44 to  improve the quality and
     accuracy of products. 
     
          Hardware and software reliability of  the SX-3/44 have proven  to
     be  excellent. The Dorval machine exceeds 99% up time across the total
     system.