Fastest US Supercomputer Runs Linux

jgercken writes "The Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has brought online a 11.8 teraflops supercomputer based on the Linux operating system, comprised of ~2,000 Itanium processors, and assembled by HP. Touted to be the fastest unclassified computer in the US, its main duties will be atmospheric chemistry, systems biology, catalysis and materials science."

Fastest Linux-based supercomputer

[DarienJax]

The headline for the Slashdot article is a bit misleading. It's the fastest non-military supercomputer in the US; it's the fastest Linux-based supercomputer in the world (at least, it's supposed to be). It's not the fastest supercomputer in the US, though.

Re:Fastest Linux-based supercomputer

[Anonymous Coward]

OMFG has slashdot gotten so fscking lazy as to not even read the SUMMARY now!?

Touted to be the fastest unclassified computer in the US, its main duties will be atmospheric chemistry, systems biology, catalysis and materials science.

1. NEC's Earth Simulator, 41 teraflops, Japan
2. Hewlett-Packard's ASCI Q, 20.5 teraflops, Los Alamos National Laboratory (Classified, Nuclear Weapons testing)
3. IBM's ASCI White, 12.3 teraflops, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. (Classified, Nuclear Weapons testing)
4. Fujitsu's Primepower, 12 teraflops, National Aerospace Laboratory of Japan.
5. Hewlett-Packard's Itanium2, 11.8 teraflops, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

But then again that chart goes of R(peak) instead of R(max)

Re:PEAK Performance

[Raleel]

Actually, they've done very well with it, it performs very close (at least as far as supercomputers go)

slashdot this one, i dare you

[Raleel]

http://www.emsl.pnl.gov/mscf

a more direct link to info about the facility. EMSL is a scientific user facility, designed to be a collaboration point and resource for environmental and molecular sciences (Environmental and Molecular Sciences Laboratory).

You can read about what the computer will be used for, what stuff is inside it, even see the job status. It's pretty neat stuff. The folks over there should be quite proud of what they've done. Yes, I work at PNNL :)

It is a demon of a machine. It's huge. It's very fast. I hope some good life/world saving chemistry comes out of it.

Re:What about the classified ones?

[bohnsack]

Not really. The top500 list [top500.org] lists LANL's [lanl.gov] ASCI Q [lanl.gov] at 20.48 Peak TFLOPS and LLNL's [llnl.gov] ASCI White at 12.29 Peak TFLOPS.

Fastest at least until...

[Glock27]

that 10,000 Opteron Cray supercomputer [com.com] comes online...although I guess that system may not be unclassified.