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."

Comments

Dupe?

[Gothmolly]

10240x more dupes?

Good news for Intel

[thebra]

This is great news for intel. They will double the number of itanics shipped in a single deal!

Hahaha, my comment is a dupe!

NASA vs RIAA/MPAA

[grunt107]

The system will have 500 terabytes of storage, the equivalent of 800,000 CDs.

In related news, the RIAA has filed a writ of discovery for illegal downloads of 'Major Tom' at NASA.

I hope technology will help

[Anonymous Coward]

But I wonder if moving from a spreadsheet to a supercomputer simulation will make it any more likely that engineers with concerns will whistleblow to non-responsive management. This is a government bureaucracy problem, not a technical problem.

Re:Geez, that's pretty impressive...

[Keruo]

nah, they're just preparing for longhorn

Re:Itanium?

[djohnsto]

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).

Re:Irony emulator

[kenaaker]

I worked on the space shuttle simulator (lo, these many years ago), and the shuttle computers are derivatives of the computers that IBM originally used in the B52's. They were called AP-101's, and if I remember correctly were Harvard Architecture systems with a separate instruction and data store memories. I think they had 128K (32 bit?) words for instructions and 64K (16 bit?)words for data.

The simulator originally ran on IBM System 360 mod 75's (serial numbers 1, 4, and 5). When I was working on it, the simulator was running on a IBM 3033 (370 architecture) machine running MVS, and had a hardware interface that attached 3 AP101's to the system IO channels. The shuttle hardware outside of the AP101's and environment were modelled in the 3033, even including the "slosh dynamics" of the fuel in the external tank. The simulator was written in 370 Assembler with macros for the programming control structures.

One of the funniest things about running the simulator came out of the major failure tests. The simulator had a distinct "abend" that indicated that the vehicle had a position that was below the surface of the earth.