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Sun Super Computer May Hit 2 Petaflops
Fletcher writes to tell us that Sun Microsystems has revealed their "Constellation System", a new supercomputing platform that the company hopes will put them back in the running for top dog in the supercomputer race. "The linchpin in the system is the switch, the piece of hardware that conducts traffic between the servers, memory and data storage. Code-named Magnum, the switch comes with 3,456 ports, a larger-than-normal number that frees up data pathways inside these powerful computers. 'We are looking at a factor-of-three improvement over the current best system at an equal number of nodes," said Andy Bechtolsheim, chief architect and senior vice president of the systems group at Sun. "We have been somewhat absent in the supercomputer market in the last few years.'"
...but will it run linux?
I dearly, dearly hope that the followups to Magnum are codenamed LaTigra and Blue Steel :)
Java apps still take 3 minutes to start up on it.
Well if they just move the petaflops out of the way before it gets there, they won't have to worry about it hitting them.
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In Soviet Russia, TFA reads you!
Please tell me the first production system will be named "Enterprise." There have to be enough people that will work on it that will be proponents of this.
We are looking at a factor-of-three improvement over the current best system at an equal number of nodes
Whoa, slowdown boy, just tell us how many laptop-miles of power this machine has!
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You missed the official rules.
3456 = 2^7 * 3^3, so it's not a completely arbitrary number.
3,456 ports. Now there's a non-computer number if I've ever seen one. It looks like someone asked, "And just how many ports do we need to be competitive," and someone else just started hitting the number keys in sequence across the top of the keyboard, starting at "3", until either Marketing was happy, or the engineer in charge fainted.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!
There ya go
Meh... In 15 years the thing will wind up as baby furniture with kid puke on it anyway.
Sun is responsible for OpenOffice. I expect OpenOffice to become the premiere office suite on PCs of all sorts any day now.
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
640k should be enough.
Have you ever wondered if there was more to life, other than being really, really, ridiculously high-performance?