SGI & NASA Plan 10240-Processor Altix Cluster

green pizza writes "NASA has announced plans to cluster twenty 512-processor Silicon Graphics Inc Altix supercomputers connected to a 500-terabyte SGI InfiniteStorage SAN. The Altix uses Itanium2 CPUs running Linux atop an Origin 3000-derrived architecture. NASA and SGI scaled Linux to 512 CPUs late last year. There are also strong hints that SGI plans to bring its clustered ATI graphics to Altix in the near future. Lots of neat big iron project on the horizon!"

Good News for intel

[turgid]

This is great news for intel. They will double the number of itanics shipped in a single deal!

Doom

[Klar]

Wonder if that thing could play Doom3?

Re:What would this be used for?

[turgid]

Sounds quite insane, I'd love to see the practical reasons for this.

With the heat given off by all those itanics, I'm sure they could do some pretty good real-word research into heat shield materials and rocket engine nozzles.

Re:Good News for intel

[musikit]

aye but they most likely would have spent the saved money on air conditioning.

That's impressive, but ..

[stinkyfingers]

Can it run a JVM running on a Windows box and still be able to refresh the graphics?

Doom 3 and 10240 Itanium2 processors

[levram2]

I'm guessing that NASA found out Doom 3 has a software renderer and are buying the minimum specs.

Re:What would this be used for?

[christophersaul]

Calculating things very quickly maybe? Just a thought. 500TB? I've never seen the need for more than 640k.

Re:What would this be used for?

[Anonymous Coward]

Put windows me on it and see how many times you can open and close Photoshop before you run out of memory.

Big plans at NASA

[pixas]

So NASA is planning to upgrade to Longhorn then?

This should be enough power...

[SunPin]

to fake a human settlement on Mars.

Re:What would this be used for?

[Timesprout]

For the conspiracy theorists who believe the moon landings were faked a collaboration between NASA and SGI on simulated exploration will just provide a basis to think that the Mars missions will not only be faked, they wont even use real actors next and the whole mission will be CGI.

So when we do 'land' on Mars, if the astonauts burst into a song and dance extravaganza during the planting the flag ceremony then the job was probably outsourced to India. If the ceremony involves a 10 hour trek up a mountain and is interrupted by hordes of attacking Martians that must be defeated by the 6 astronauts then they probably got Peter Jackson to do it. If the whole mission is really lame and not quite what you were hoping for, look no futher than George Lucas.

After it's built..

[stratjakt]

It whirs and clicks and sputters..

Finally, the following cryptic message mysteriously appears on it's console:

42

This could mean the end of civilization...

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Doesn't NASA know that Linux is national security threat [slashdot.org]??? And 10240 cpu cluster no less? Don't they know that such concentrated evil will create a singularity? This could be the end of our civilization.

Re:What would this be used for?

[Stephen Samuel]

What would you do with 10k processors hooked up to 500 terabytes?

It can do realtime hologram movies, and pop the popcorn while you're watching it.

Someone at NASA...

[TWooster]

... was reading too much Slashdot.

I knew nothing good could come of all those beowulf cluster ideas!

Re:What would this be used for?

[DAldredge]

You know that WOSH! you just heard? That was the sound of the fscking joke going right over your head.

There should be an IQ test before one is allowed to post to /. I reached this conclusion when I was told I was new here and shouldn't respond to trolls. The user sending me the email had a UID about the level of yours.

Re:What would this be used for?

[Anonymous Coward]

I reached this conclusion when I was told I was new here and shouldn't respond to trolls. The user sending me the email had a UID about the level of yours.

You must be new here...

(Besides, how do we know you didn't just swipe that user account from someone or get it on ebay?)