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Fastest US Supercomputer Runs Linux
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."
They clearly aren't considering the Powerstack 5000
tcd004
Can it run Quake II properly with 200 bots set to godlike abilities? ;)
I've left to find myself. If you happen to see me, please, keep me there until I return.
Being the Department of Energy I though they would have used AMD chips so they could use the excess heat to drive a power plant.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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.
Sig:Why copyright isn't a fundamental human right
OMFG has slashdot gotten so fscking lazy as to not even read the SUMMARY now!?
Touted to be the fastest unclassified computer in the US, its main duties will be atmospheric chemistry, systems biology, catalysis and materials science.
1. NEC's Earth Simulator, 41 teraflops, Japan
2. Hewlett-Packard's ASCI Q, 20.5 teraflops, Los Alamos National Laboratory (Classified, Nuclear Weapons testing)
3. IBM's ASCI White, 12.3 teraflops, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. (Classified, Nuclear Weapons testing)
4. Fujitsu's Primepower, 12 teraflops, National Aerospace Laboratory of Japan.
5. Hewlett-Packard's Itanium2, 11.8 teraflops, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
But then again that chart goes of R(peak) instead of R(max)
http://www.emsl.pnl.gov/mscf
:)
a more direct link to info about the facility. EMSL is a scientific user facility, designed to be a collaboration point and resource for environmental and molecular sciences (Environmental and Molecular Sciences Laboratory).
You can read about what the computer will be used for, what stuff is inside it, even see the job status. It's pretty neat stuff. The folks over there should be quite proud of what they've done. Yes, I work at PNNL
It is a demon of a machine. It's huge. It's very fast. I hope some good life/world saving chemistry comes out of it.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
But according to Apple the G5 is 10% quicker under their latest benchmark tests.
Well first, your site has that spark of a "I'm a Tesla Alien Abduction Genius Who Will Solve Everythin gWith Cold-Fusion" genius. That frankly make me seriously consider whether I should even click on the next link.
Then you have (DONATE HERE) banners that (NO HERE) make your site really (GIMMEE) hard to read. The more massive projects dont beg like that. If you cant/wont support it, that's what the GPL was for.
And lastly, the style presented reminds me of the magazine, OMNI. There's that feel of spoofery/hokey kind of "I'm code-God" that just makes me want to click that nice xkill on that window.
It may be a good project, but the presentation really sucks. Even the basic Black text on white with simple images looks cleaner/better than that.
I don't think even the Death Star could /. this bitch.
"Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
Linux? Come on, let's get to the important stuff...
Will it run SETI??
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.