$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."

Comments

Supercomputer(s)

[totallygeek]

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.

'Open'

[Ed Avis]

'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.

Re:Other OSes

[markmoss]

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.