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$24.5 Million Linux Supercomputer

An anonymous reader wrote in to say "Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (US DOE) signed a $24.5 million dollar contract with HP for a Linux supercomputer. This will be one of the top ten fastest computers in the world. Some cool features: 8.3 Trillion Floating Point Operations per Second, 1.8 Terabytes of RAM, 170 Terabytes of disk, (including a 53 TB SAN), and 1400 Intel McKinley and Madison Processors. Nice quote: 'Today's announcement shows how HP has worked to help accelerate the shift from proprietary platforms to open architectures, which provide increased scalability, speed and functionality at a lower cost,' said Rich DeMillo, vice president and chief technology officer at HP. Read Details of the announcement here or here."

7 of 376 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Other OSes by hawkstone · · Score: 5, Informative

    1. IBM ASCI White,SP Power3 375 MHz
    Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

    It runs AIX.

    2. Compaq AlphaServer SC ES45/1GHz
    Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center

    Haven't used it, but I'm guessing Tru64.

    3. IBM SP Power3 375 MHz 16 way
    NERSC/LBNL

    Once again, AIX.

    4. Intel ASCI Red
    Sandia National Labs

    A poor home-grown OS (no offence) called Cougar or TFlops which doesn't even support X11 or sockets.

    5. IBM ASCI Blue-Pacific SST,IBM SP 604e
    Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

    Can you say AIX?

    6. Compaq AlphaServer SC ES45/1GHz
    Los Alamos National Laboratory

    I assume Tru64.

    7. Hitachi SR8000/MPP
    University of Tokyo

    No idea. Sorry.

    8. SGI ASCI Blue Mountain
    Los Alamos National Laboratory

    IRIX.

    9. IB SP Power3 375 MHz
    Naval Oceanographic Office

    Don't know for sure, but you can bet it's AIX.

    10. IBM SP Power3 375 MHz 16 way
    Deutscher Wetterdienst

    Again, I'm sure it's AIX.

    All Unix. No, no linux on there yet, but Pacific Northwest will be right up there near the top, and Lawrence Livermore is also probably getting a linux cluster of almost that size pretty soon. That will make two in the top few slots.

    No Windows on these puppies! ;)

  2. Here's another supercomputer running Linux by qurob · · Score: 3, Informative


    What about this one?

    3:00 a.m. March 22, 2000 PST
    The University of New Mexico and IBM are teaming up to build the world's fastest Linux-based supercomputer.

    Named "LosLobos", the new supercomputer is scheduled to be fully operational by the summer


    Whats the current status?

  3. Re:Banking heavily on McKinley not tanking. by afidel · · Score: 2, Informative

    IBM RS/6000's with Power4 cores? Since the Power3 is the dominant chip in the current top10, hell top20 I would guess it's bigger and better brother will be there soon. Also what about Sledgehammer could we see another mega cluster like ASCI Red(which is still #4 despite being based on PPro 150's)?

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  4. SGI by mapnjd · · Score: 2, Informative

    SGI certainly do sell machines with more processors than this: SGI ASCI Blue Mountain has 6144 CPUs

    Re: your less-than-insightful comment on x86: Intel's ASCI Red has 9472 x86 CPUs. Guess what - they don't share 4GB memory...

    Like the other poster said: look up NUMA.

    nic

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  5. Re:Supercomputer(s) by afidel · · Score: 2, Informative

    Since almost none of the top500 supercomputers are true old style supercomputer's I doubt many people would agree anymore. Vector supercomputers are expensive (hmm we'll have at least as much r&d as intel but spread it across a couple 10's of thousands of cpu instead of millions), They are finite in their expansion, and they are only extremely usefull for a handfull of problems (although they are the ones that most bother "normal" computers). Clusters of comodity systems using high performance interconnects has been the way HPC has been moving since the mid 90's, There are currently no traditional supercomputers in the top10, and there are only 4 in the top25. Redundancy is taken care of using scheduling algorithms that can handle a few lost nodes, heat, hehe well since the old Crays used liquid nitrogen cooling I doubt a cluster is any worse than any other solution, and yes space is a consideration, but most institutions that have HPC's will either build them their own building or will be removing an old supercomputer that does considerably less and takes up more room (remember computers keep getting more dense in terms of flops/sq ft).

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  6. GOOGLE! by Jagasian · · Score: 5, Informative

    What about Google?!? It should qualify as a Linux supercomputer. For those who don't know, Google, the popular search engine, uses a huge cluster of PCs running Linux.

  7. Linux IS Unix by leereyno · · Score: 4, Informative

    AIX is Unix
    BSDI is Unix
    HP-UX is Unix
    Solaris is Unix
    Sun-OS is unix
    Digital Unix...is Unix
    FreeBSD is Unix
    NetBSD is Unix
    OpenBSD is Unix
    A/UX is unix
    Xenix is unix
    Unixware is unix
    SCO Unix is Unix
    NextStep is unix
    Unicos is unix
    Irix is unix
    Ultrix is unix

    and yes, Linux is Unix.

    It may not be Unix(tm), but it certainly is unix, at least as much as any of the above operating systems are. Whether or not an OS has one line of code from Thompson and Ritchie or BSD is irrelevant. What matters is what kind of a system its code implements. The code for Linux, including all of the GNU components and other userland parts, implement an operating system that is at least as similar to any of the above mentioned OS's as they are to one another. I don't know just exactly how compliant Linux is with the various posix standards, but I have heard it referred to as posix compliant, and I know that NO version of unix is completely compliant.

    If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck....its a duck.

    Lee

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