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."

Licensing

[wideBlueSkies]

Did HP buy licenses for this setup? Could this be why SCO says HP is in the 'clear'?

wbs.

The surefire way to get Slashdot's attention...

[Anonvmous Coward]

... is to run Linux on it.

"It's solving complex problems and moving 11.8 terraflops, but the real interesting bit is that it's running Linux!"

Re:Grid Computing and AI

[Creepy Crawler]

Well first, your site has that spark of a "I'm a Tesla Alien Abduction Genius Who Will Solve Everythin gWith Cold-Fusion" genius. That frankly make me seriously consider whether I should even click on the next link.

Then you have (DONATE HERE) banners that (NO HERE) make your site really (GIMMEE) hard to read. The more massive projects dont beg like that. If you cant/wont support it, that's what the GPL was for.

And lastly, the style presented reminds me of the magazine, OMNI. There's that feel of spoofery/hokey kind of "I'm code-God" that just makes me want to click that nice xkill on that window.

It may be a good project, but the presentation really sucks. Even the basic Black text on white with simple images looks cleaner/better than that.

Re:What about the classified ones?

[fgodfrey]

Well, I work for one of the companies that sells "classified" computers to the government. Typically, the sale itself isn't classified (especially since Cray is a public company) and sometimes, there's even a press release [cray.com] (that's one of ours from this spring). What "classified" usually means is that access to the system and the data on the system is classified. I don't have a security clearance, hence I can't look at, say, a crash dump from one of those sites. So, for your questions:

1) The NSA, Army, various other US and foreign government agencies.

2) Cray, SGI, IBM, HP (look at the Top 500 [top500.org] list for a good reference) and others. The Top 500 even lists a number of systems as "classified".

3) Uh, well, people *do* know about them.

Re:Fastest Linux-based supercomputer

[Anonymous Coward]

Well according to the "top 500 computers" site, There are only 2 computers more powerfull then the department of energy's, The NEC Earth Simulator of Japan(which simply blows all other computers away) and the HP-developed Ascii Q of Los Alamos fame.

Oh and by the way, The number 3 was also running linux.

Hehe, I still have a old 486 that I use as a file server and that operates well while running Linux. And I've seen wrist watches that run linux.

So from those to the current #3 fastest computer in the world. Now that's what I call SCALABILITY.

Re:Grid Computing and AI

[boots@work]

Why didn't the /. editors want to post a story about this?

About a project whose webpage is nearly free of content aside from a plea for donations, whose most significant announcement is "02/17/2003: GridShell website created!!!", and whose demo seems to be hung? Beats me, that sounds like the crap they usually post :-)

Bringing True Aritificial Intelligence to the Desktop TODAY

You should go easy on the bold, capitals and exclamation marks. They make you sound amusing like a viagra spammer. (Or was that your intention?)

But aside from that, what's "True Artificial Intelligence"? Something that can pass a strong Turing test? Now that would be news.

Here's a clue for free: why not put on your home page a description of the project that is not just a string of buzzwords?

It's expensive ... VERY expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Nuff said!

And it uses Itanium2 CPUs

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone is picking up on the fact that this supercomputer runs Linux, but no one seems to have commented on the fact that it uses Itanium2 processors.

Now I wouldn't consider that point newsworthy, were it not for the constant FUD levelled against the Itanium.

The reason for the FUD is obvious -- it's because the Itanium-ready version of Windows is still mostly 32-bit code, which means that Windows' performance sucks on an Itanium CPU. Linux, on the other hand, gets the full 64-bit boost, with more to follow as the compilers are improved. Thus, Microsoft is afraid that, if the Itanium becomes popular, lots of people will see Linux performing much better than Windows.

That's also why Microsoft-friendly journalists and posters have been working so hard to promote AMD's Opteron. It's nothing against AMD, of course, but AMD compromised, and catered to Microsoft's failings, by dedicating part of the Opteron's real estate to native 32-bit support. As a result, Windows performance doesn't suck quite as much on AMD's 32/64-bit Opteron, as it does on Intel's fully-64-bit Itanium.

This supercomputer should put an end to the "Itanium is slow" and "Itanium is going nowhere" FUD. But I emphasized "should" because it probably won't -- FUD writers have never cared about facts.

We Need a Better Benchmark

[radulovich]

As these things get faster, we'll need a better benchmark. A TERAFLOP??? Come on - can anyone really put into words what this can actually do?

How about running SETI on it for a day (or an hour) and seeing how many units it can crank out? Then we would finally have something comparable to our own lives that we can comprehend.

I doubt that many people know how many M/G/Tflops their own computer is, but many more probably know how long it takes to run a SETI unit.

As a side note, I'm working on a project for my employer to put in a PETAbyte size storage solution. Now I know a petabyte is a million gigabytes, but it's much easier to think of it as seven years of medical images for each of the 30 hospitals we have. :)

-Mark