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Fastest Commercial Supercomputer To Be Built
Zeus305 writes: "Today NuTec Sciences, Inc. will be announcing its purchase of the world's fastest commercial supercomputer, second overall only to ASCI White. NuTec will use and lease time on the 1,250 clustered IBM servers to analyse genes decoded by the human genome project to try to better understand the causes of diseases like cancer by running month-long algorithms that analyse the relationships between different areas of the genome. This beast will have 2.5 terabytes of RAM and 50 TB of disk space."
That very powerfull distributed systems are starting to become more mainstream. It's about flipping time that companies made use of computing resources beyond their previously wildest dreams.
Estimates of 437 years compressed to 1 month timeframes are awesome! The next big issue will be how fast will they be churning out cures/treatments? If this helps speed this up, there will certainly be a great number of lives saved.
Hopefully though more companies will jumpt to the forefront, and try to outdo each other ( you know they will) and come up with more radical applications and solutions.
I was curious - it had been asked - what OS are these beasts running?
I donate all spillover Karma to the charity of my choice... Ada was still a babe despite what people may say...
Isn't this trend towards faster supercomputers being driven by advances in Computer Science, rather than Engineering?
Remember the Cray Y-MP? Used to be the world's fastest computers were designed to be extremely fast CPU's, built as a sphere to shorten contact length and liquid-cooled. Parallel computing was possible then - the problem was that we couldn't break down the problems we wanted to solve into parallel events.
Today's brand of parallel supercomputers exist to solve a different kind of problem - a problem in which the "search space" can be compartmentalized and distributed- like the RSA challenge, fluid dynamics, chess, and -of course- the human genome.
The thing to remember when we read about ever-faster parallel computers is that, for all intents and purposes, when you have to solve a truly sequential problem (what the cray folks would have called a 0% vector-optimized problem) - today's supercomputers usually aren't any faster than the desktop computer you're sitting in front of. Compute the Fibbonaci sequence (without solving it for x) and race your PIII with this computer - and you might win.
Just something I wish they'd point out. We need a better adjective than faster for parallel computers. They're something else. Maybe... wider.
Suggestions?
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