With video, Shazam! EETimes, yesterday, had the pleasure of attending the official launch of the Pleiades machine at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility in Mountain View, CA. Pleiades constitutes a major architecture shift away from its older sister, Columbia. The shift from Itanium to Xeon, however, seems to be paying dividends already as it debuted at #3 on the Top500.
For those interested in all the nitty gritty details, here goes. The SGI ICE-based system includes over 12,000 quad-core Intel Harpertown chips connected with one of the largest Infiniband fabrics in existence. For the topology-aware in the audience, its a dual-plane 10-D hypercube. That’s two independent 4X-DDR Infiniband host ports per node. Twenty-one miles of Infiniband cables and roughly 100 cabinets later, you get Pleiades.
EETimes was also lucky enough to get a video interview with Robert [Bob] Ciotti, chief architect of NASA’s advanced systems facility. You can view the three minute interview here.
For more info, read the full article here.