11-09-2004, 01:41 AM
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2000 Posts And This is All I Get?
Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 2,017
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Supercomputers, want one ?
NASA/SGI's Columbia Supercomputer :
NASA unveils its newest supercomputer today during a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the agency's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. The "Columbia" is one of the world's most powerful supercomputing systems. Columbia was named to honor the crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia lost Feb. 1, 2003.
Comprised of an integrated cluster of 20 interconnected SGI� Altix� 512-processor systems, for a total of 10,240 Intel� Itanium� 2 processors, Columbia was built and installed at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility at Ames in less than 120 days.
Prices of the new processor stay in the range of the current price list. The 1.6 GHz 9M version lists for $4226 or $1 less than the previous flagship with 1.5 GHz and 6 MByte L3 cache. The 1.6 GHz model with 6 MByte L3 cache is priced at $1980, 4 MByte drops the price to $910.
10240 * $4226 = $40 millions. And that is the cost of the processors only. 8O
The coolness of working inside the same room with a 10240 itanium (with 9M cache each) monster ...
http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2004..._columbia.html
http://www.sgi.com/features/2004/oct/columbia/
http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews...08_154447.html
IBM Blue Gene/L :
IBM'S Blue Gene supercomputer, which is still being installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, has set an unofficial performance record.
The $100 million supercomputer is being built to analyze the US nuclear stockpile, sustained performance of 70.72 trillion calculations per second using a standard test program. This beats the fastest computer in the world NEC's Earth Simulator which can only sustain 35.86 trillion calculations per second using the same software.
IBM has begun building the chips that will be used in the first Blue Gene, a machine dubbed Blue Gene/L that will run Linux and have more than 65,000 computing nodes, said Bill Pulleyblank, director of IBM's Deep Computing Institute and the executive overseeing the project. Each node has a small chip with an unusually large number of functions crammed onto the single slice of silicon: two processors, four accompanying mathematical engines, 4MB of memory and communication systems for five separate networks.
65,000 * 2 = 130,000 processors running on Lunix ? :mrgreen:
Imagine playing Quake 3 on these machines, you'll get 1,000,000 fps at extra high quality and 16x AA/AF ? 
{Ok, quake 3 won't run on these processors, but it is OK to dream, right ?}
http://news.com.com/2100-1008_3-1000...g=fd_lede2_hed
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