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

    What OSes do the other top 10 supercomputers run?

  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. 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 ?

  4. 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?

  5. 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.