Slashdot Mirror
Half-Petaflop Supercomputer Deployed In Austin
SethJohnson writes "Thanks to a $59 million National Science Foundation grant, there's likely to be a new king of the High Performance Computing Top 500 list. The contender is Ranger, a 15,744 Quad-Core AMD Opteron behemoth built by Sun and hosted at the University of Texas. Its peak processing power of 504 teraflops will be shared among over 500 researchers working across the even larger TeraGrid system. Although its expected lifespan is just four years, Ranger will provide 500 million processor hours to projects attempting to address societal grand challenges such as global climate change, water resource management, new energy sources, natural disasters, new materials and manufacturing processes, tissue and organ engineering, patient-specific medical therapies, and drug design."
So now we know why there is such a shortage of quad-core AMD Opterons otherwise.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
A: The more flops, the more powerful it grows.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
With that many cores, they will need to find new energy sources just to power it, and re-think water resource management as they redirect the river to cool the thing and to prevent it from causing global climate change itself!
Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
No, it's hoped that within that time you'll learn how to correctly use the apostrophe.
Do you really want to have a $59M machine dependent upon Dell customer support?