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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."

10 of 376 comments (clear)

  1. Other OSes by frizz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What OSes do the other top 10 supercomputers run?

    1. Re:Other OSes by rutledjw · · Score: 2, Interesting
      I may be ignorant, but I is a college graduate. Doesn't Hitachi compete (to a degree) with IBM in the Big Iron class of machines? Wouldn't that suggest an OS/390-like OS? Just guessing.

      Another thing that I just thought about, maybe someone can answer for me. What about OS/390? I thought that was their big mainframe OS. Is this a speed issue with the OS, clustering limitations (certianly not) or maybe ease of use (people would rather deal with *nix than a 'frame OS)?

      Any input?

      --

      Computer Science is Applied Philosophy
  2. Insanely expensive by Jeff+Knox · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Wow, do the math thats $17,500 per processor (node). Thats 24.5 million divided by 1400. Whats the deal with that? Even with top of the line components, the fastest interconnects available (Dolphin or Myrinet or whatever), thats a 7 million dollar computer at most (5 grand a machine, with SCI could even build much faster then a 8Teraflop box, hell a dual Athlon or Intel based system would be cheaper and whale on that). Software? Nothing, althought they are probably going to use Scyld or something and pay the bucks. Im willing to bet that half that cost pure adminstrative and contract over head and support.

    --
    Jeff Knox
    1. Re:Insanely expensive by Raleel · · Score: 5, Interesting

      AFAIK, 1/2 of the cost of each node is the interconnect, which has 1-3microsecond latency and gigabit bandwidth. The 24.5 million figure also includes a huge storage array on fibre channel (like 150 terabytes, I believe). And note, each node has 12 gig of ram.

      --
      -- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
  3. big deal is by Ilgaz · · Score: 1, Interesting

    so, what will that supercomputer will be used for? Arms? Petrol? Investigation? What?

    I wouldn't be happy for such thing happen...

  4. Effect on linux ? by nilsj · · Score: 3, Interesting

    How will this affect linux ?
    Will HP come up with something revolutionary in linux development while constructing this system or is the tech used conventional - just on a bigger scale ?

    1. Re:Effect on linux ? by djbentle · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The leader of the ASCI Blue program spoke at a graduate seminar I attended. He mentioned that when they first got AIX up and running on the over 6000 processors they found once a year bugs (a bug that in a normal implementation would only appear roughly once a year) at a rate of one every few days for quite a while. At the very least it ought to help flush out a lot of very rare bugs.

      David

  5. Banking heavily on McKinley not tanking. by Christopher+Thomas · · Score: 5, Interesting

    They're awfully confident of McKinley not following in the footsteps of Merced if they've placed this order.

    This raises an interesting question, though. If you want to build a high-performance compute cluster nowadays... what do you build it out of? The old answer, Alpha, doesn't really apply any more.

    Sun is optimized for communications bandwidth, not FLOPS, and I'm not sure if SGI even _offers_ machines that huge. HP is betting on IA64. And x86 is competely unsuitable, for memory space reasons if nothing else.

    What am I missing?

  6. If you find that interesting... by jbischof · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The worlds largest supercomputer is being built as we speak at various campuses around the world. Its a multipart system with various clusters linked together at the different campuses. If your interested I covered the basics of the system below.

    TeraGrid is the name of the soon to be world's largest computing cluster that will be completed in 2002. It will contain approximately 3,300 Itanium(TM) and McKinley processors on IBM servers running Linux connected through a Qwest fiber-optic network. Once completed the TeraGrid will be capable of a massive 13.6 teraflops and will have access to 450-600 terabytes of data.
    This is a huge step (for Intel at least) in acceptance of the Itanium processor into the server market. Intel is fueling the program by providing optimized compilers and software as well as various customized tools.

    It is being funded by the National Science Foundation by a $53million grant. Various researchers will have access to the system to perform a variety of simulations. Possible uses include :

    -Molecular modeling for disease detection
    -Drug discovery
    -Automobile crash simulations
    -Climate and atmospheric simulations
    -any other approved scientific research purposes

    The TeraGrid will be unique because it will link together various computing clusters at different locations rather than host them all at the same location. Globus is providing open-source protocols that will determine how the grids will communicate with each other. These open-source protocols will create a "plug-n-play" type effect where more machines could easily be added to the network.

    The largest section of the TeraGrid will be hosted at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. There will also be portions of the TeraGrid at the University of California San Diego, Argonne National Laboratory, and the California Institute of Technology.

  7. Re:GOOGLE! by Julian+Plamann · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yep, Google runs on a cluster of approximately 4,000 1U servers. Each can be pulled and replaced including automatic configuration/loading of the operating system and software configuration within about 20 minutes I believe. Pretty neat setup.