Sandia's Red Storm Detailed Architecture

Posted by simoniker on Wednesday October 29, 2003 @06:03PM from the red-storm-rising dept.

Roland Piquepaille writes "Bill Camp & Jim Tomkins, from Sandia National Laboratories, have published a 77-page document about the architecture of the Red Storm supercluster being built by Cray Inc. The new nickname for the 40 teraflops system is "Thor's Hammer." Please read the full presentation if you have the time (PDF format, 3.54 MB). This technical analysis gives you the major characteristics of the system which will be operational by August 2004. With its 108 compute cabinets and its 10,368 compute node processors (AMD Opteron running at 2.0 GHz), it is expected to reach 20 teraflops on MP-Linpack. The report also looks at scalability and reliability, which are essential for a sytem which will be expanded to 30,000 processors in the future."

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network bandwidth by martin · 2003-10-29 21:42 · Score: 3, Insightful

AS per usual the difficult but of clusters (esp at this level), isn't the code (quote "can easily be done" at the right level of efficiency), or physically linking the boxes,,,

but making the network linking up the thing.

# Sustained file system bandwidth of 50 GB/s for each color
# Sustained external network bandwidth of 25 GB/s for each color

wow! That's not peak, but sustained..for me that's the impressive bit.
"Thor's Hammer"? by Resound · 2003-10-30 02:32 · Score: 3, Insightful

Why not go all the way and call it Mjollnir? (and while they're at it,nickname the two head techs "Brok" and "Eitri")