HP's Finis Terrae shared memory super

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On Friday HP announced a new HP Integrity Itanium-based shared memory cluster in Spain. The system is named Finis Terrae (a Latin phrase meaning “the end of the earth,” and its also the name of the southernmost school of its kind in the western hemisphere)

HP logoFinis Terrae offers an unparalleled high-performance computing (HPC) cluster that delivers the application performance, storage power and throughput needed to handle scientific, technological and research challenges at Spain’s Supercomputing Centre of Galicia (CESGA).

…“At CESGA, we are contributing to the future of supercomputing in collaboration with HP, Intel and the research community of Galicia and CSIC [Spanish Council of Scientific Research],” explained Ignacio Lopez, technical director, CESGA. “With the Galician universities, CSIC scientific community and other academic entities in Spain having access to Finis Terrae, the execution of high-performance calculation tasks delivering on quick analyses and valuable scientific results will contribute to the society’s well-being.”

The release also provides some helpful stats

  • A cluster of 142 nodes with 16 Intel Itanium 2 processor cores each of HP Integrity rx7640 combined with HP Integrity Superdome servers with 1.3 terabytes (TB) of main memory. The rx7640 nodes are based on a 16-way shared memory architecture with scalable memory bandwidth and provide an accumulated shared memory space of 19 TB.
  • An Infiniband high-performance interconnection network between all nodes including the Superdome systems.
  • Hierarchical storage system of 390 TB on disc and 1 petabyte(2) on robotic tape libraries, the largest in Spain.

And some downright odd stats, notably the rarely reported system weight: 33,500 kg. Read the release here.