SGI & NASA Plan 10240-Processor Altix Cluster

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SGI & NASA Plan 10240-Processor Altix Cluster

Posted by timothy on Wednesday July 28, 2004 @03:19AM from the like-a-cluster-of-grapes dept.

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!"

3 of 202 comments (clear)

Re:Honest question: Why Linux? by WindBourne · 2004-07-28 03:32 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

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Re:What would this be used for? by Timesprout · 2004-07-28 03:41 · Score: 5, Funny

For the conspiracy theorists who believe the moon landings were faked a collaboration between NASA and SGI on simulated exploration will just provide a basis to think that the Mars missions will not only be faked, they wont even use real actors next and the whole mission will be CGI.

So when we do 'land' on Mars, if the astonauts burst into a song and dance extravaganza during the planting the flag ceremony then the job was probably outsourced to India. If the ceremony involves a 10 hour trek up a mountain and is interrupted by hordes of attacking Martians that must be defeated by the 6 astronauts then they probably got Peter Jackson to do it. If the whole mission is really lame and not quite what you were hoping for, look no futher than George Lucas.

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Re:SGI was supposed to be dead by arth1 · 2004-07-28 06:20 · Score: 5, Informative

I'm glad to see that SGI has regained its legs and is back in the high-end computing market again. The gamble they made in embracing Linux has paid off.

What few people seem to know (and appreciate) is that SGI has been one of the major contributors to Linux over the last few years. Not only XFS, but lots of commands, utilities and system functions have been enhanced, based on IRIX code. This has been a significant boost to Linux, and it's only fair that SGI reaps some benefits.
I wish SGI and its employees the best of luck!

Regards,
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*Art