NASA Installs Linux Supercomputer

unassimilatible writes: "Federal Computer Week reports that NASA plans to study the ocean's future with the help of the world's first supercomputer of its kind to run on the Linux operating system. The new supercomputer -- an SGI AltixT 3000 single-system image supercomputer -- has been installed at the space agency's Ames Research Center in California."

Comments

Re:Altix

[rf0]

The thing is this Altix is 256 CPU machine in a single system image. They are looking to take this to 512 in a single image. That is some serious scaling

Rus

how does this compare?

[kjba]

"NASA plans to study the ocean's future with the help of the world's first supercomputer of its kind to run on the Linux operating system."

Nice to know that it is the fastest Linux supercomputer, but how does this compare to the other top-ranked supercomputers in the world?

Nice to see SGI still making sales

[Space cowboy]

... I have something of a soft-spot for SGI, and it's nice to see them still making high-profile sales - it'll do their government profile no end of good :-)

512 processors running a single image is pretty cool :-))

Simon

Single System Image is Nice

[4of12]

The thing that is special about the NASA computer is that it is a single image system

I did parallel code development on Sun SMP boxes. Starting up jobs, seeing what was going on, killing zombies, debugging was all easier on one system than through different boxes you'd have to ssh over to see.

Even though I was using MPI and getting ready for a distributed memory architecture for the really big runs, the development was easier on the SMP box that showed a single system image.

I haven't used things like OpenMOSIX, and Don Becker, early pioneer of Linux ethernet drivers (not many other folks can claim a complete decade of experience with Linux networking), founded a company called Scyld that sells Linux clusters with single system image.

Sometimes it's convenient to see the whole box as if it were one, even though efficient programming dictates that you become aware of the different costs of data access (network, main memory, cache, disk). Practically speaking, developing and running parallel jobs is a higher user productivity proposition on a single system image.