Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

10-TFlop Computer Built from Standard PC Parts

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the economic-supercomputing dept.

OrangeTide writes "Using PCI host adapters and Xeon processors, engineers at Lawrence Livermore National Labs have achieved 10-TFlops relatively cheaply. More information can be obtained from this article at EETimes." Lately, Linux seems to be the operating system of choice for new supercomputers, and this one's no different. It's cool to see big iron made cheaply.

1 of 247 comments (clear)

  1. I had to laugh at these bits:- by Scooter · · Score: 2, Troll

    It's very impressive what they've built, and I'm not knocking it, but I nearly split my sides at some of the quotes not directly related to the speed or hardware architecture of the thing:-

    "We have been using the File Transfer Protocol over Gigabit Ethernet, but now we will be able to read files directly from any available disk,"

    Well - like wow - NFS/CIFS anyone. They've been ftp'ing docs to each other? ROFL :)

    "Being able to share data across the enterprise is an exciting new capability. It will allow more collaboration among research projects,"

    Ahh my sides are splitting - "shock news, scientists discover file sharing" heheh. Don't these guys have a file server? Guys listen up - you didn't need to design a world beating clusterbeast with 10Tflops just to share some files! LOL all that power just to let Larry from Sub-Atomic Meddling dept. look at a paper from Dave from the Induced Super Novae Working Comittee heheheh. These guys need to get out more: imagine their annoyance when they made this big announcement only to discover that not only has Novell, Microsoft/SAMBA, Unix/NFS done this already - they did it with only one CPU in the server!

    "This network approach is nice because we can use a standard PCI slot on each processor node, "

    Hmm like any network card you care to mention then really... Heheh "Hey like.. this network stuff is like - cool man!" What next? They invent a board with a button for each character they need to type? Priceless.

    I'm sure it's great but I only just stopped laughing at those quotes. I can only imagine (or hope) it's a case of clueless journo mis-quoting or quoting out of context or just completely missing the point of the project.