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TeraGrid Gets an Upgrade

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the we-need-more-flops dept.

The Fun Guy writes to tell us The NSF has awarded $48 million to the University of Chicago to operate and expand TeraGrid over the next five years. TeraGrid is 'a national-scale system of interconnected computers that scientists and engineers are using to solve some of their most challenging problems. TeraGrid is the world's largest open computer, storage and networking system. Only the U.S. Department of Energy's weapons laboratories have larger systems, which are dedicated to classified research.' Currently, the TeraGrid's power is just over 60 teraflops.

6 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Imagine... by Danathar · · Score: 2, Insightful

    yes

  2. Department of Energy? by RandomPrecision · · Score: 2, Insightful
    So they have computer systems larger than TeraGrid for weapons research? Imagine if the Department of Energy applied those resources to improving or replacing gasoline, supplying California's nearly-insatiable demand, creating more efficient power...

    ...you know, developing sources of energy.

    1. Re:Department of Energy? by kayak334 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      DoE currently has a 136TFLOP cluster . They use it for more than nuclear weapons research.

  3. Re:just put xbox 360s together by FLAGGR · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Just incase you weren't joking.

    Microsoft can say they get x amount of tflops, and lets pretend for a moment that theoretically they are telling the truth. In reality, things *never* get to their potentials because of bottlenecks, unless of course your building super computers and have millions to invest. Microsoft and Sony can play the TFlops game, but in the end they aren't that powerful (as ArsTechnica has reported based on developer comments, they are much closer to 2-3 times the current generation in power)

    I know you were probably joking, but you were modded insigtful and I couldn't help myself.

  4. Re:just put xbox 360s together by CTho9305 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    CPU Game Math Performance
            * 9.6 billion dot product operations per second
    9.6GFLOPS*60=576GFLOPS. That's not even remotely close to 1TFLOPS, let alone 60 TFLOPS. You're off by 2 orders of magnitude.

    --
    My server
  5. Re:Every time I run a 500 proc batch job ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    The TeraGrid is well managed too.. very few problems for such a huge system.

    Actually it isn't. Each site has it's own way of doing things, its own software stack (NMI alleviates some of this), and its own particular configuration. It translates to a bunch of clusters interconnected by a high-bandwidth, low-latency network.

    Ever ran a cross-site application?