PNNL's new 160TF super

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

This week the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory announced that it has flipped the switch on its newest super: a 4,620 quadcore processor, 160TF machine from HP

HP logoThe newest supercomputer in town is almost 15 times faster than its predecessor and ready to take on problems in areas such as climate science, hydrogen storage and molecular chemistry. The $21.4 million Chinook supercomputer was built by HP, tested by a variety of researchers, and has now been commissioned for use by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the Department of Energy.

…Chinook is fast and dexterous. Its designers tailored its architecture to handle scientific problems whose complexity require more than just power or speed. For example, climate scientists who are trying to understand the tiniest particles in the atmosphere or chemists watching how atoms tug at each other in a molecule need a different kind of supercomputer than physicists studying questions like the birth of the universe.

Chinook’s top job is to run NWChem, a computational chemistry program that allows researchers to simulate and predict the chemistry within and between molecules. But a wide variety of programs can run on the supercomputer.

Comments

  1. This is a joke. I’ve been using this machine for over a year.

  2. Well, H, then you must have been fortunate to have had access to the machine before it was officially in production. The news from PNNL is that the machine has been officially commissioned, and since this is not a machine I covered when it was delivered, I wanted to make sure that our readers knew about the machine.

  3. That’s one heck of a super computer. Well, molecule computations can be very complex, as the need for this computer shows. Any info about the specs of this computer?