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LinuxBIOS, BProc-Based Supercomputer For LANL

Posted by timothy on from the yeah-but-what-about-the-neon-lights dept.

An anonymous reader writes "LANL will be receiving a 1024 node (2048 processor) LinuxBIOS/BProc based supercomputer late this year. The story is at this location. This system is unique in Linux cluster terms due to no disks on compute nodes, using LinuxBIOS and Beoboot to accomplish booting, and BProc for job startup and management. It is officially known as the Science Appliance, but is affectionately known as Pink to the team that is building much of it."

1 of 189 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Uses by marm · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Does anybody know other applications that supercomputers are being used for. I know some do weather predictions.

    Ok, non-military uses, off the top of my head:

    • mathematical research - simply complicated maths on big numbers
    • fluid dynamics modelling - traffic flows, or aerodynamics, or hydrodynamics - this is also tied in quite closely with weather/climate prediction
    • statistical modelling - wouldn't you like to know if the stock market is going to go up or down tomorrow, before it happens?
    • computational chemistry/biochemistry - protein folding is just the tip of the iceberg - imagine being able to design a molecule and then simulate the effect it will have on the human body, without that substance ever having been actually synthesized or going near a human... this is the future of drug development
    • quantum mechanical simulation - related to computational chemistry, imagine taking all those complicated quantum mechanics equations to their logical conclusions, predicting as-yet undiscovered subatomic particles and their behaviour, or to design better magnetic containment fields so that practical fusion energy generation is possible
    • good old-fashioned databases and signal processing - when you have hundreds of terabytes of data that you wish to mine for interesting patterns, speed matters

    I'm sure there are plenty more applications for supercomputer power - any kind of complicated or chaotic system is a good candidate for modelling, especially when there's more than one unknown variable (multivariate analysis is complicated, to say the least).