Hewlett-Packard has sold 90 dual-processor Itanium 2 machines to the Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden's largest engineering school, for use in a wide variety of intense calculation tasks.

The institute purchased 74 rx2600 dual-processor servers and 16 zx6000 dual-processor workstations, HP said Friday. They will be used at the ParallelDatorCentrum, a computing center funded chiefly by the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing, to tackle problems in areas ranging from life sciences to astrophysics. The institute did not release how much it paid for the machines, but calculations show that they would cost at least $1.3 million on the market.

The 90-computer cluster is expected to be running by this summer, but within a year, the institute expects to triple its computing capacity with additional HP computers. In addition, the cluster will be linked into Sweden's national "grid" for scientific computing, one of many networks of shared computers that collectively tackle even larger computing problems.

HP helped design Intel's Itanium processor family, a high-end product that first came out in 2001. Intel hopes Itanium will push aside IBM's Power processors and Sun Microsystems' UltraSparc processors.

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