$24.5 Million Linux Supercomputer 379
An anonymous reader wrote in to say "Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (US DOE) signed a $24.5 million dollar contract with HP for a Linux supercomputer. This will be one of the top ten fastest computers in the world. Some cool features: 8.3 Trillion Floating Point Operations per Second, 1.8 Terabytes of RAM, 170 Terabytes of disk, (including a 53 TB SAN), and 1400 Intel McKinley and Madison Processors. Nice quote: 'Today's announcement shows how HP has worked to help accelerate the shift from proprietary platforms to open architectures, which provide increased scalability, speed and functionality at a lower cost,' said Rich DeMillo, vice president and chief technology officer at HP.
Read Details of the announcement here or here."
Supercomputer(s) (Score:3, Insightful)
I am impressed, however, with any of these clusters, and am amazed at the cost savings. But, you have other concerns with a huge cluster: redundancy, heat, energy usage, space requirements, etc.
'Open' (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately there is no fully open hardware platform at the moment, and closed hardware is less of a problem than closed software, but still this sounds like marketspeak.
Re:Other OSes (Score:2, Insightful)
4. Intel ASCI Red
Sandia National Labs
A poor home-grown OS (no offence) called Cougar or TFlops which doesn't even support X11 or sockets.
Why does a parallel machine need X11 or poor (slow) communication primitives? Why should a full OS run on all the processors ? The OS really needs to get out of the way of the computations where every microsecond counts.
charmer
I want A beowolf cluster of these (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Other OSes (Score:5, Insightful)
Supercomputer != Mainframe
Supercomputers are just for calculations on massive arrays. Mainframe OS's are designed for government & large corporation databases, etc. They are heavily loaded with "frills" that are unneeded on a pure number-cruncher; they improve database reliability and do many other useful things in the data-processing environment, but they're just wasted cycles on a supercomputer.
Imagine... (Score:2, Insightful)