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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."
that it completes an infinite loop in only 5 seconds!
Perhaps it can run spell- and grammar-checks on Slashdot submissions!
A: The more flops, the more powerful it grows.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I'm glad to see AMD based projects like this, as they have certainly took a hit in the HPC space as of late.
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
And the other half is deployed in Dallas?
Doesn't like cognitive dissonance? Have you ever _BEEN_ to Austin?!
(Score:0, Redundant)
Yeah, I suppose a cluster is redundant.
The 4 year lifespan in the /. article refers to the amount of time the award money covers for operations costs. So if it finds some others mean s of operation funds it could live longer... of course those funds will probably be from a private organization and the ranger would no longer be open for research.
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
Both Opteron and Phenom were at the same B2 stepping, complete with the same L3 errata, despite the different packaging. That's why you haven't seen a Tier one vendor touch the Opterons with a 10 foot poll for a generally available product. You can bet your ass this is the reason AMD released the kernel patch so 'some customer' could proceed with a Linux Opteron deployment with B2 parts without the performance penalty nor risk of the L3 errata.
This deployment is probably where AMD focused a firesale of B2 parts, since it's nice and well controlled.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
No, it's hoped that within that time you'll learn how to correctly use the apostrophe.
The rest are going to SETI@home
In their backyard, and Sun gets the job instead. (Maybe this is why Dell has started offering AMD?)
They say the mind is the first thing to
Just grab a few and you'll be set for the next four years...
Seriously though, this money comes from an NSF grant earmarked specifically for this project. We get these kind of complaints from other departments and especially undergrad editorials in the student newspaper. Unfortunately, the budget from the football team won't be used to renovate the social work buildings.
chillax137
I was at TACC a few weeks ago, and the peak performance was around 519 teraflops.... Sadly, they also said the word on the street is that IBM wont take too kindly to the new king in town, and since TOP500 is biannually, everyone is biting their nails about blue-gene getting a quick upgrade in time to stay on top. Turns out the blue-gene systems are so scalable its quite easy to strap a few thousand new processors for a nice performance boost.
Seems like the "processor hours" metric needs some adjustment to account for multi-core. Otherwise I could build one of these with 15,744 single-core processors and claim the same performance.
Why are you associating processor-hours with performance anyway? You could hook up 15,744 286s and get the same number of processor-hours too. So why don't you complain about that?
And the answer is apparently yes. According to techtarget.com It'll be running CentOS just like slashdot does.
Yes, and probably not.
All comments are properties and trademarks of the voices in my head. Not like I'm gonna claim them.
Explanation: this affirmation that "a computer is so fast it runs an infinite loop in X seconds" is actually true. Integers overflow, if you increase the largest positive number you get a negative number. But of course, this program uses 32-bit integers, it would take four billion times longer running in 64 bits.