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Fastest US Supercomputer Runs Linux

Posted by simoniker on from the vroom-vroom-vroom dept.

jgercken writes "The Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has brought online a 11.8 teraflops supercomputer based on the Linux operating system, comprised of ~2,000 Itanium processors, and assembled by HP. Touted to be the fastest unclassified computer in the US, its main duties will be atmospheric chemistry, systems biology, catalysis and materials science."

6 of 314 comments (clear)

  1. PEAK Performance by OverlordQ · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If you notice this is based on PEAK Performance, aka Theoretical Max, not the best they've gotten out of it . . .

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  2. What about the classified ones? by Blaine+Hilton · · Score: 4, Interesting
    They say this is the fastest, "unclassified" supercomputer, immediately I think:
    1. Who has the classified super computers?
    2. What companies do they buy them from?
    3. If they were bought from public company how do they buy it without people knowing about it, especially after the additional scrutiny since Enron and Worldcom?

    Also after reading the whole press release I'm stuck with a few measly pictures of a bunch of HP rack servers running a processor that I won't be able to buy (let alone afford) for awhile longer. There is no mention about how much heat the thing produces, or how much energy it takes to run it. I hope the Ph.D.s running the whole thing realize that while they are trying to do stuff for the "Department of Energy" they are releasing so many thousands of pounds of junk in the land/air/water to run this giant supercomputer.

    1. Re:What about the classified ones? by dspeyer · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The National Security Agency (NSA) owns many extremely powerful computers. No one knows what operating systems they run, which ones are clustered together, or what they do with them. It is widely speculated that they are trying to brute force public keys used by foreign governments, which would be in line with their official purpose, but no one knows for sure.

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    2. Re:What about the classified ones? by dspeyer · · Score: 4, Interesting
      That's probably true. The story I hear from people (mathematicians) who worked for the NSA is that they were given a problem (they can't say what) with no obvious applications to anything and told to work on it. It was speculated that some of the problems had no applications at all (yet) and were given to confuse enemy intelligence. Could be true....

      In any case, I'm sure the sysadmins were told to build a computer with given specs, on a given budget and timetable, and not to worry about the actual software that would run on it.

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  3. Fastest Unclassified... by Bonker · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Makes you wonder for a second what they're doing with the [SECRET - EYES ONLY] hardware.

    My guess is that they're working on NP-hard, but useful problems, like finding ways to crack hard encryption via shortcuts that work half the time.

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  4. A Brief History of Supercomputing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    In the dim times there was one company called Cray that built big, expensive custom designed vector supercomputers. It took forever to build one so Cray could always insure they were profitable because they always new how many orders they had well in advance and could staff and spend appropriately and they were pretty much the only game in town.

    One day SGI got tired of doing just fluffy graphics and built the MIPS R8000 which was probably the first really successful CMOS supercomputer on a chip. They completely carved up Cray from the low end up and eventually pushed them into a merger from hell that nearly destroyed both companies.

    Around this time the Department of Energy had to give up setting off nuclear bombs to see if they actually worked and got in the business of funding these massive supercomputers mostly to simulate bombs and then some other stuff too. Unfortunately the DOE changed companies and architecture with each new contract. They managed to suck SGI, Intel, IBM, Cray, HP and countless others in to this prestige contest and I doubt its been particularly good for any of them. You see these are one off systems, that require a massive very custom engineering effort and the R&D effort seldom pays off. Its just not a good way to do business spending massive engineering effort when your usually lucky to sell one system. If you get a second one you usually have to start from scratch and do it all over again.

    They are great for prestige and maybe some of the R&D effort does translate into the companies product line but, IMHO, I think a smart, well managed computing company wouldn't touch these with a ten foot pole. Microsoft sure doesn't seem interested in pouring any effort in to trying to land one of these contracts.

    If the U.S. government had a clue they would find a way back to pouring all their money in to Cray to develop the specialized vector processors and find a new little Cray Jr. company to specialize in building the giant Linux clusters and encourage companies like IBM and HP to get out of this massive distraction from their core business.