SDSC Chooses Appro for Next Major Super

Appro announced this morning official details regarding the new San Diego Supercomputing Center [SDSC] “Gordon” platform.  Appro has officially been chosen to provide the new machine based on their next generation Xtreme-X compute platform.  When fully configured in 2011, Gordon will peak around 245 TFlops with 64 TB of DRAM, 256 TB of flash memory and 4PB of disk storage.

The new SDSC supercomputer will provide benefits to many potential scientific applications to include both academic and industrial researchers in need of fast, interactive methods to manipulate large volumes of structured data,” said SDSC Interim Director Michael Norman. “Gordon will become a key part of a network of next-generation high-performance computers (HPC) being made available to the research community through an open-access national grid.”

The Gordon platform will include 32 “supernodes” based on the latest Intel Xeon processor available in 2011 combined with some “special sauce” technological innovations, including virtual shared memory software.  Using this virtual shared memory software, each of the system’s 32 supernodes has the potential to peak around 7.7TF with 10TB of aggregate memory [2TB of DRAM and 8TB of flash memory].  The interconnect will be the latest and greatest in Infiniband technology in 2011.  The system will come preconfigured with Appro’s Cluster Engine [ACE] management stack [hi Shanon!] in order to keep all the goodies in sync.

SDSC is recognized as a national leader in creating and providing cyber-infrastructure for data-intensive research,” said Daniel Kim, CEO of Appro. “SDSC is also dedicated to elevate the competitiveness of advanced technologies to accelerate supercomputer performance. We welcome this opportunity to work with SDSC to provide cutting-edge, advanced supercomputing solutions to fulfill this significant award.”

For more info on the new digs within Gordon, read their full release here.