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Aussie Scientists Build a Cluster To Map the Sky
Tri writes "Scientists at the Siding Spring Observatory have built a new system to map and record over 1 billion objects in the southern hemisphere sky. They collect 700 GB of data every night, which they then crunch down using some perl scripts and make available to other scientists through a web interface backed on Postgresql. 'Unsurprisingly, the Southern Sky Survey will result in a large volume of raw data — about 470 terabytes ... when complete. ... the bulk of the analysis of the SkyMapper data will be done on a brand new, next generation Sun supercomputer kitted out with 12,000 cores. Due to be fully online by December, the supercomputer will offer a tenfold increase in performance over the facility's current set up of two SGI machines, each with just under 3500 cores in total.'"
They're x6275 blade modules, meaning dual quad core Xeons with a max of 96GB of RAM.
I like the CMT SPARCs as much as anybody else, but they're frankly not competitive for this sort of workload (massive compression).
"The more corrupt a society, the more numerous are its laws." -Tacticus
They're moving from 1.6Ghz single core Itaniums to dual quad core Xeon blades. I suspect they're talking about cores to emphasize the density gain, and because people like huge numbers.
"The more corrupt a society, the more numerous are its laws." -Tacticus
SGI stopped making supers many years ago.
The Altix line begs to differ. They're not using Onyxes.
"The more corrupt a society, the more numerous are its laws." -Tacticus