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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.'"
Back in the 1980s, what distinguished the Amiga (and later Steve Job's excellent NeXT) was the ability to split data among multiple co-processors and pipe it quickly around the motherboard, eliminating bottleneck and liberating the processor. Now in the PC world we're finally seeing this architecture recognized as new Intel chips tout their front-side bus and cache more than sheer increase in speed.
This SUN machine is a bigger-scale example of the same. It uses AMD Barcelona chips, and derives its power from internally routing data more efficiently than (most of) its competitors. It seems that in the Moore's-law endgame, what makes the chip a star performer is the surrounding components and their engineering for efficiency.
This will be better for geeks, as it makes the skill of efficient design come back into play after years of "bigger is better." Now if it just extends to software as well, we'll all benefit...
technical writing / development
no, IBM hasn't built a production system yet, they haven't even achieved 3PF or even 1. They did the same thing they always do, benchmark a rack and extrapolate (in the most ideal and ridiculous situation) to an installation like 126 racks (I don't care who you are, that's a lot of freakin rack). Sun is doing the same thing, they don't have a 3k port switch, they're just saying they'll be releasing one. Look for an installation using one or an SKU to order.