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NASA Upgrades Weather Research Supercomputer

Posted by samzenpus on from the new-thermometers dept.

Cowards Anonymous writes "NASA's Center for Computational Sciences is nearly tripling the performance of a supercomputer it uses to simulate Earth's climate and weather, and our planet's relationship with the Sun. NASA is deploying a 67-teraflop machine that takes advantage of IBM's iDataPlex servers, new rack-mount products originally developed to serve heavily trafficked social networking sites."

4 of 71 comments (clear)

  1. Well how long? by the+eric+conspiracy · · Score: 5, Funny

    Does this mean that the forecasting simulation for tomorrow's weather will run in less than 24 hours?

  2. Coincidence? by ciaohound · · Score: 1, Funny

    NASA Engineer: "You know, chief, I've been thinking. I bet we could just about triple the performance of this thing if we supercooled it."
    Manager: "Super what?"
    Engineer: "Chilled it to absolute zero, like in the large hadron supercollider. Speeds up the electrons."
    Manager: "What would you need to do that?"
    Engineer: "Oh, I don't know, maybe... a ton of liquid helium?"

    --
    Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
  3. Re:Big Question: by SL+Baur · · Score: 2, Funny

    No, no, no!

    This is slashdot and the big questions are:
    does it run Linux?
    FTFA:

    IBM said its new server, which runs Linux and is based on Intel's quad-core Xeon processors

    W00t!

    Can you imagine a Beowolf cluster of these things and can you give me a car analogy of how fast these things run?

    I, for one, welcome our new IBM iDataPlex overlords.

  4. Re:Big Question: by Kardos · · Score: 2, Funny
    You must be new here.

    This is slashdot and the big question is: does it run vista?

    In Soviet Russia, supercomputers simulate you !

    There, fixed it for you.