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New Linux Supercomputer Forecasts Rain

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the but-with-a-chance-of-sunshine dept.

buzzcutbuddha writes "Linux PR has a press release about a new weather forecasting supercomputer running Linux built by High Performance Technologies, Inc. that will be unveiled on Wednesday by NOAA. There is even a phone number to call to tour the High Performance Computer Center. " (let's see if the trolls can be clever for a change ;) Anyhoo 276 nodes, but its costed $15M? Them must be some spendy nodes...

1 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. Why it cost $15 million by Greg+Lindahl · · Score: 5


    This contract includes 2 substantial upgrades; this is just the initial installation. The AlphaLinux cluster (yes, connected with Myrinet) is most of the initial equipment. There's also a tape robot from ADIC with 70 terabytes of tape (1400 tapes) and 20 tape drives, and a storage area network (SAN) using CVFS, a SAN filesystem being ported to Linux because of this contract.

    The main software used on the system is actually all free: Linux, the PBS batch queue system, mpich as modified by Myricom for MPI, and the SMS scalable modeling system, developed at FSL. FSL has demonstrated some of their software scaling efficiently up to around 100 nodes. Limits in scalablility, the Alpha's superior floating point performance, and Compaq's great AlphaLinux compilers are the reason we used Alphas.