Terascale Computing System Installed

lysie writes The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, with Compaq and the NSF, has installed the Terascale Computing System. Worldwide, it's second in power only to ASCI White at Livermore. However, it's the most powerful system in the world for unclassified research--6 teraflops per second. 3,000 Compaq Alpha EV68 microprocessors, in 750 four-processor AlphaServer systems running Tru64 UNIX."

Comments

Re:Where's Linux?

[warlock]

Bah... why not Tru64, why Linux?

Obviously you've never used Digital Unix, and you are not familiar with their kick ass, highly optimizing compilers... they ain't gonna build a cluster like that to run apache+mod_php and serve crap you know, it's all about number crunching.

Supercomputers...

[maan]

I'm in a class at CMU with the head of the PSC...we've been having fun these past weeks, with him talking to us about this "machine". Seems their #1 objective right now is to submit the best possible score for the TOP 500. Apparently, the deadline was October 1st, but then they have some time after that to "rectify" their score...

There was a fun story apparently about a slowdown that was due to _one_ RAM dimm not seated properly... So 2999 processors were doing their job, but then waiting for the last processor to finish its job, which was taking much longer...

I've seen pictures of this beast. All I can say is: wow. So many cables, so many machines...

And apparently, they're not yet completely connected. Each box is supposed to have two connections to a "fat tree" quadrics network. Well right now they only have one... But it seems that Linpack isn't so communication oriented, so it's not too big a strain on the network.

Maan

Re:Scales like a real UNIX should

[bconway]

Alpha was the first non-x86 port of Linux, done by Linus himself after being given a DEC machine as a gift on a trip to the US (though I don't recall if it was on loan or not).