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SGI & NASA Plan 10240-Processor Altix Cluster
green pizza writes "NASA has announced plans to cluster twenty 512-processor Silicon Graphics Inc Altix supercomputers connected to a 500-terabyte SGI InfiniteStorage SAN. The Altix uses Itanium2 CPUs running Linux atop an Origin 3000-derrived architecture. NASA and SGI scaled Linux to 512 CPUs late last year. There are also strong hints that SGI plans to bring its clustered ATI graphics to Altix in the near future. Lots of neat big iron project on the horizon!"
What would you do with 10k processors hooked up to 500 terabytes? Sounds like you could replace every machine Nasa has with an account on this thing.
Sounds quite insane, I'd love to see the practical reasons for this.
Good news for Intel indeed, but wouldn't the same deployment with AMD Opterons been cheaper AND faster??
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
Itanium has better floating-point performance than Opteron, although the price/performance is worse. There are no 512-way Opteron systems; maybe NASA likes to write shared-memory parallel applications.
The reason? The License. While BSD License really is the most free, it would allow IBM to put a lot of effort into it, and then have MS swope in, modify it, and sell with a sorts of closed APIs, etc.
In essence, the BSD license would allow the creation of another Unix model where the core is identical or just similar, but the APIs would be used to lock users in. How would that solve IBM's problem? Or for that matter any Hardware vendors problem? It would not.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.