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$24.5 Million Linux Supercomputer

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the bigger-is-always-better dept.

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."

6 of 376 comments (clear)

  1. Supercomputer(s) by totallygeek · · Score: 3, Insightful
    The problem I have with calling these huge clusters supercomputers is that they really don't seem to fit the mold of the term. I prefer to call them supercomputing networks. When I think of a supercomputer, I am thinking of one entity that is hugely multi-processor or multi-boxed in an enclosure. These systems usually have matrixed processing technology and perform a specialized task for the hardware wrapped around them.

    I am impressed, however, with any of these clusters, and am amazed at the cost savings. But, you have other concerns with a huge cluster: redundancy, heat, energy usage, space requirements, etc.

    --
    Click here or here.
  2. 'Open' by Ed+Avis · · Score: 4, Insightful

    'Open architectures'? But it's going to be running Intel's proprietary IA-64 family, where the USPTO has even granted patents on certain CPU instructions. H-P's claim would ring more true if they'd gone with IA-32 (which has two competing suppliers, at least) or SPARC (which you can license from some half-baked consortium).

    Unfortunately there is no fully open hardware platform at the moment, and closed hardware is less of a problem than closed software, but still this sounds like marketspeak.

    --
    -- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
  3. Re:Other OSes by charmer · · Score: 2, Insightful


    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.

    Why does a parallel machine need X11 or poor (slow) communication primitives? Why should a full OS run on all the processors ? The OS really needs to get out of the way of the computations where every microsecond counts.

    charmer

  4. I want A beowolf cluster of these by rveno1 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Imagine a Beowolf cluster of these babies

  5. Re:Other OSes by markmoss · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What about OS/390? I thought that was their big mainframe OS.

    Supercomputer != Mainframe

    Supercomputers are just for calculations on massive arrays. Mainframe OS's are designed for government & large corporation databases, etc. They are heavily loaded with "frills" that are unneeded on a pure number-cruncher; they improve database reliability and do many other useful things in the data-processing environment, but they're just wasted cycles on a supercomputer.

  6. Imagine... by cerskine · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Can you imagine a beowulf cluster of these babies?!