$24.5 Million Linux Supercomputer

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Wednesday April 17, 2002 @01:32AM 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."

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Re:Other OSes by markmoss · 2002-04-17 04:09 · 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.