In an announcement Monday, the Salt Lake City-based vendor said the supercomputer will be installed by partner Computer Sciences Corp. to initially supplement other powerful computers at the NCCS, which is part of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

The pricetag for the system was not disclosed.

The system is expected to be running by mid-summer, but future phases could expand the system through 2007, said Steve Perry, vice president of government sales for Linux Networx.

The supercomputer is designed to scale to as many as 40 trillion floating-point operations per second (TFLOPS) in its full configuration, according to the vendor. The 128-node system will use 3.2 GHz Intel dual-core Dempsey processors, and feature an Infiniband Network from Silverstorm Technologies. This system includes a high-performance storage subsystem, with 60TB of raw Data Direct Networks storage running the IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS).

"For over 20 years, NASA Goddard has been at the forefront of adopting new supercomputing technologies and approaches," Robert Ewald, CEO of Linux Networx, said in a statement. "We're honored to be selected as NASA Goddard's partner as they continue to advance their scientific computing capabilities."