Blue Horizon, an IBM SP supercomputer, was launched as the nation’s fastest academic-use supercomputer, capable of more than 1 trillion FLOPs.

Funded through the NSF’s Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program, the IBM Blue Horizon was subsequently upgraded to 1.7 teraflops of computing power and 576 gigabytes of memory for leading-edge academic research. Allocations on the machine were made through the NPACI national peer-reviewed allocation process, with preference given to problems that took advantage of the machine’s unique capability.