John Towns, technical program manager at NCSA, estimates that the friendly user period will last two to six months, depending on what problems are uncovered. Initial accounts will be limited to 1,000 cpu hours, but additional time may be requested. Faculty and postdoctoral students serving as principal investigators may also request additional logins for collaborators. With the Origin2000 system, researchers will address large-scale, highly complex problems. For example, environmental scientists can combine isolated models of atmospheric precipitation, surface water flow and watershed ecosystems.
Researchers then study their interactions over months, days ,or minutes.
Chemical engineers might simulate and optimize a chemical plant's operation by combining chemical processes with interactive engineering design. NCSA received the first Origin2000 in October, 1996. It provides a symmetric multiprocessor environment that scales to larger numbers of processors and larger memory configurations. It currently consists of 128 R10000 processors and 24 Gbytes of memory. Initial access is restricted to the 32-processor systems.