Entries filed under “New Installations”

Nebojsa Novakovic has posted some interesting details on the Chinese-built processor used in the Sunway Bluelight supercomputer, which ranked number 14 on the recent TOP500 list. The rumors seem to be correct; the CPU is based on the DEC Alpha processor.

SW3 aka SW1600 is a 16-core, 64-bit RISC processor, with each core looking a lot like an improved version of the 21164A EV56 Alpha core, plus vector FP unit extension added to each core. While the initial speed range was 1 to 1.2 GHz in the 65nm process, the standard speed grade is a 1.1 GHz chip with 141 GFLOPs DP FP performance. The speed set for the Bluelight Petaflop machine’s Top 500 run was 975 MHz, though. The quad-channel 128-bit DDR3 on-chip memory controller offers 68 GB/s bandwidth – yes, equivalent to 8 channels of DDR3-1066 server RAM.

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Tom Pfingsten writes that the $20 Million Gordon supercomputer at SDSC is the biggest flash memory-based system anywhere.

Center spokesman Jan Zverina said Thursday that Gordon is particularly suited for applications such as analyzing traffic patterns and making sense of huge quantities of economic data. “It’s not only fast, but it can really mine through massive, massive amounts of data to find that needle in the haystack —- that little aberration or trend that you want to pick up in reams and reams of data. It’s easily the most powerful supercomputer in Southern California now.”

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Marty Graham from Wired Magazine has posted a profile of SDSC’s Gordon, the world’s first flash-based supercomputer.

Gordon uses 300 terabytes of flash, spanning 1,024 high-performance Intel 710 series drives, and the system includes new software designed to aggregate resources from multiple physical server nodes into “super-nodes,” so users have immediate access to data, rather than waiting for the system to access particular drives. Allan Snavely, the SDSC’s associate director, sees this as the world’s largest thumb drive. Flash memory is stuff used not only in USB thumb drives but cell phones and digital cameras. According to Snavely, Gordon can run massive databases up to 10 times faster than traditional memory, and it now ranks 48th on the official Top500 list of the fastest supercomputer in the world. The project is part of a larger trend in the supercomputer game, where systems are moving away from traditional components, toward new types of hardware that can improve speed, cost, efficiency, and, in the case of the Chinese, independence from the West.

In case you missed it, this video shows SDSC Director Michael Norman and the “IOPSoMeter” at SC11, which clocked the Gordon supercomputer at an unprecedented 35 Million IOPs. Read the Full Story.