During 1988 IBM invited RAL to become the UK participant in its European Supercomputing Initiative, a programme to establish centres of excellence in numerically intensive computing using IBM 3090-600E mainframes with Vector Facilities. Under a two-year joint study agreement the Atlas Centre's IBM 3090-200E with one Vector Facility would be upgraded to 3090-600E/6VF. RAL would arrange for a set of 'strategic users', drawn from the SERC-funded sector of the UK academic community, to undertake and report on substantial computational science or engineering projects that would exercise and benefit from the large memory and the vector and parallel computing capabilities of the 3090 system.
The strategic users, selected by a committee chaired by Professor P G Burke, came onto the system in the spring/summer of 1989 and reported on their work at a seminar at RAL in May 1991 at which the opening address was given by the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State in the Department of Education and Science. The study agreement was extended for a third year to include methods for co-operative computing between the 3090 system and IBM workstations.
To place the IBM machine in context, the aggregate peak computational power of the six-processor 3090 system was less than that of the Atlas Centre's four processor Cray X-MP/48 supercomputer (696 vs 940 MFlops) but the IBM machine had substantially larger main memory (256 vs 64 MB) and secondary solid state memory ( 1024 vs 256 MB), thereby opening up options for tackling computational problems with characteristics different from those suitable for the Cray X-MP.
