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NASA To Get 10,240 Node Itanium 2 Linux Cluster
starwindsurfer writes "US space agency Nasa is to get a massive supercomputing boost to help get its shuttle missions back in action after the 2003 shuttle disaster. Project Columbia, a collaboration with two technology giants, will mean Nasa's computing power will be ramped up by 10 times to do complex simulations."
10240x more dupes?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Think of it less of a win for Itanium and more of a win for SGI Altix (that happens to use Itanium). The SGI Altix machines have a single system image with 512 processors (there are 20 of these clustered together). As far as I know, this is actually the cheapest and highest performing system that can use 512 nodes in a single system image. Other choices (which I'm not even sure scale to 512 processors) include Sun (slow), Power (expensive), and MIPS (SGI predecessor to the Altix - slower). Also, they are working on methods to increase single system image size to 2048 nodes, I believe an industry first. Some workloads just like running in single system images much better than on clusters.
As for Itanium vs. Opteron - the Itanium kicks the Opteron's ass in floating point. Since NASA is presumably going to be doing a lot of engineering simulations, good FP performance is highly desirable. Having 6 MB of cache per node probably helps the Itanium beat out the Opteron for large memory footprint workloads as well.
Basically, until Cray releases Red Storm (not sure if they'll stay in business that long), an Opteron system doesn't exist that can match the performance of the SGI Altix.
Finally, Itaniums are NOT "rediculously more" compared to the 8xx Opteron line (which is the Itanium's real competitor in this area).
Dan