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$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."
What OSes do the other top 10 supercomputers run?
... Cause if they put WinXP Pro on it, the project would cost:
$24,500,399.98
Which was juuust over budget!
BTW - Can you put in code during the "post slashdot story" to automatically close the <I> tags? I don't think that would be too difficult to add...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Scheduled to be fully operational in early 2003...
Won't it be obsolete by then?
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
So does that mean it has 3.6 Terabytes of swap space?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
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?
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? --
"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."
Microsoft finally release the baseline specifications for there next generation operating system...
"What do you mean you have no ice? Do you expect me to drink this coffee hot?" - Random Customer, Clerks
Let's see the story when they make one with 1,800 AMD processors!
Palo Alto, CA: In the news today, 26 researchers, who had been constructing a new super computer for the government running on 1,800 AMD processors, were killed today when they fired up the machine for a test run. Apparently, they had forgotten to turn on the water pumps for the computer's cooling system before starting up the computer. Thousands of megawatts of electricity were instantly turned into heat energy, resulting in a contained explosion that vaporized all the researchers instantly, and turned the building into a pile of melted plastic, metal, and concrete.
One local, who wishes to remain unknown, said when interviewed, "It was crazy! I mean, the whole building just melted. The heat waves coming out of the building were staggering, it was all I could do just to run into the nearest air-conditioned Starbucks and catch my breath."
The speed of time is one second per second.
In other OTHER terms, on a machine like this, the lastest build of Mozilla is actually smooth and responsive.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
What about Google?!? It should qualify as a Linux supercomputer. For those who don't know, Google, the popular search engine, uses a huge cluster of PCs running Linux.