TACC "Stampede" Supercomputer To Go Live In January

Nerval's Lobster writes "The Texas Advanced Computing Center plans to go live on January 7 with "Stampede," a ten-petaflop supercomputer predicted to be the most powerful Intel supercomputer in the world once it launches. Stampede should also be among the top five supercomputers in the TOP500 list when it goes live, Jay Boisseau, TACC's director, said at the Intel Developer Forum Sept. 11. Stampede was announced a bit more than two years ago. Specs include 272 terabytes of total memory and 14 petabytes of disk storage. TACC said the compute nodes would include "several thousand" Dell Stallion servers, with each server boasting dual 8-core Intel E5-2680 processors and 32 gigabytes of memory. In addition, TACC will include a special pre-release version of the Intel MIC, or "Knights Bridge" architecture, which has been formally branded as Xeon Phi. Interestingly, the thousands of Xeon compute nodes should generate just 2 teraflops worth of performance, with the remaining 8 generated by the Xeon Phi chips, which provide highly parallelized computational power for specialized workloads."

Comments

Why so little memory?

[afidel]

I wonder why it's got such little memory? You can easily run 64GB per socket at full speed with the E5-2600 (16GB x 4 channels) without spending that much money. Heck for maybe 10% more you can run 128GB per socket (You need RDIMM's to run two 16GB modules per bank). They're apparently only running one 16GB DIMM per socket (any other configuration would be slower on the E5) which IMHO is crazy as you're going to have a hard time keeping 8 cores busy with such a small amount.

Ah, memories!

[hyades1]

This reminds me of an old science fiction story. The designers, builders and programmers assemble. The Switch is flipped. The computer boots. The first question they ask is, "Is there a God?" The machine hums away for a few seconds, then arc welds the power switch open and responds, "There is now!"