NCSA To Build $53 Million, 13-Teraflop Facility

Quite a few readers submitted news of a distributed system to be built by four U.S. institutions (mostly) out of IBM computers, and paid for with a whopping grant. DoctorWho and november writes: "'The National Science Foundation has awarded $53 million to four U.S. research institutions to build and deploy a distributed terascale facility...' A link to the press release is here." An anonymous reader contributed a link to coverage on Wired, and GreazyMF to one of this story at the New York Times.

Comments

for comparision

[Alien54]

For comparision there is the Cosmology Machine in Britain, which among other things consists of an integrated cluster of 128 Ultra-SparcIII processors and a 24-processor SunFire, and has a total of 112 Gigabytes of RAM and 7 Terabytes of data storage. With all of this power it can perform up to 456 billion arithmetic operations in a second (228 billion floating point and 228 billion integer operations)

This is impressive, but the nasa machine will blow it out of the water.

Re:This is the future of the Internet

[Brazilian Geek]

We're heading towards a massive parallel global computing system controlled by no single entity

Unless, maybe, it's controlled by MS... Take a look at these two articles on The Register:

- MS poised to switch Windows file systems with Blackcomb
- How Microsoft's file system caper could wrongfoot the DoJ

Re:OS/software

[Anonymous Coward]

That's NOT the OS software they're using; they're using Linux. Globus is NOT an OS. It's an add-on, and one that's been around for years and years now.