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NASA To Get 10,240 Node Itanium 2 Linux Cluster

Posted by Hemos on from the building-it-better-safer-and-faster dept.

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."

2 of 249 comments (clear)

  1. Itanium? by iamdrscience · · Score: 1, Troll

    Can anyone point out any significant advantage of the Itanium that justifies the fact that it costs ridiculously more than its competition (i.e. AMD Opteron)? The only reason I can think of to explain why NASA would go with an Itanium cluster over something else would be Intel giving them a great price break on them. In which case I'd like to assert that Intel is just doing it for the free promotion a la Apple (remember the G5 cluster Virginia Tech bought?).

    1. Re:Itanium? by iamdrscience · · Score: 0, Troll

      I'm sorry, I didn't read the article very carefully, I thought this was a large cluster of single processor computers rather than a small cluster of supercomputers. It does make sense that they're using Itaniums for this. Still though, I find it a little disturbing that my post above is now modded troll considering it really was an honest question. Whatever though.