The overwhelming majority of projects are in materials science and physics; many are focused on nanotechnology computations, especially cutting-edge research on semiconductor nanostructures such as Si and Ge nanowires, metal nanowires such as Au and Cu, very thin nanowires and also carbon structures, such as C-60, carbon nanotubes and graphene nanoribbons. All of these have potential use as devices that could replace silicon in semiconductors.

CENAPAD-SP is celebrating their substantial expansion with an inauguration event on March 14 that includes distinguished guests SGI Chief Technology Officer Dr. Eng Lim Goh, a representative from Brazil's Ministry of Science and Technology, the Vice Chancellor of Unicamp, the Chancellor of Research at Unicamp, the Secretary of the National System for HPC (SINAPAD) - the consortium of Brazil's seven national computer centres to which CENAPAD-SP belongs - and several directors of other SINAPAD centres.

"This new Altix system will expand and improve the capabilities and the possibilities of research because the community that uses our centre will be able to do faster calculations, longer calculations, and bigger calculations", stated Edison Zacarias da Silva, Professor of Physics, Unicamp and Director, CENAPAD-SP. "We chose SGI Altix again because there are some jobs that absolutely require shared memory processing. We are very excited to start using this new system, which represents three or four times the capacity of our existing systems. We will continue our existing research but with faster time to insight, and with these added resources we will tackle new problems that we could not have attempted before."

Physics projects make up 94 percent of the SGI systems' usage, followed by chemistry, and to a lesser extent engineering and biology research projects. The new SGI Altix 450 systems are expected to bring in more chemistry researchers because the leading chemistry application, Gaussian, has been installed by SGI at the centre's request.

CENAPAD-SP purchased four SGI Altix 450 systems with a total of 176 Intel Itanium 2 processors, an SGI InfiniteStorage 220 system for disk-to-disk storage, an SGI Altix 120 system, and 25TB of additional storage for an existing SGI Infinite Storage TP9300 system.