IBM, DOE, and VA Linux Building Open Cluster Center

DaveM writes "The Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory is working with IBM and VA Linux Systems to build "Chiba City" -- the largest supercomputing cluster dedicated to highly scalable open source software development. The 512-CPU Linux cluster will be opened to the U.S. research community, including universities, laboratories and industry. "

Comments

This is pretty cool.

[Dacta]

It appears this cluster is for development of open-source software. That is amazing - I doubt there are many computers in the world that are more powerful than this and used for software development.

Almost all the super-clusters like this one are used for energy research, weather forcasting, and other scientific research (and of course "classified purposes").

I guess they will be developing super powerful scientific anaylasis applications, but I do wonder what exactly. I mean, isn't half the problem with this type of application developing the algorithms for weather forecasting (or whatever) in the first place?

I suppose they can develop some kind of supercomputer infrastrucure that would be useful in all type of supercomputer applications. (PVM?)

A highly scalable image rendering package would be pretty cool, too.

--Donate food by clicking: www.thehungersite.com

(REALLY OFFTOPIC; you have been warned)

[Q*bert]

This usage is immortalized in certain Beasie Boys lyrics:

• I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy cheeba; I grow it.
• Yeah I smoke cheeba; it helps with the brain. I might be a little udsted, but I'm not insane.

It will be interesting to see how the DOE's attempt to power Washington D.C. with cheeba turns out. Clinton is sure to oppose it, even though we know he used to fill up on chiba fuel (but didn't actually burn it).

Vovida, OS VoIP
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product

It had to be said...

[phil reed]

Jeez, I wonder what a Beowolf cluster of these things would be like.

Uh, wait... oops.


...phil

Re:this will prove linux is tops, once and for all

[Tet]

solaris/sun hardware cannot even compare to intel/linux scalability and SMP efficiency.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Go away and don't come back until you've got a clue. When was the last time you saw Linux running on a 64 CPU SMP system? Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge Linux fan and have been running it for nearly 8 years now (I've even had it running on Sun Enterprise servers), but it doesn't yet scale as well as Solaris.

it's also why 80% of major corporations are abandoning solaris for linux.

Really? And just where did you pluck this figure from? In my experience, a few major corporations are replacing Solaris with Linux for DNS, email, and maybe web serving, and they're doing it for price/perfomance reasons, not for SMP scalability. None are doing it at the high end.