Group Blog
Sunday 28 Dec 2008, 10:00am
NASA supercomputer tracks climate change
Posted by:
The US space agency NASA has built the world's third largest supercomputer to model climate change - and used commodity Intel Xeon processors.
The design of the Pleiades system, which has opened in NASA's Ames research centre in California, pushes the limits of Infiniband communications by extending the interconnect out to make a LAN linking multiple systems, in a hypercube topology with 64 end points, according to a report in EETimes.
The machine actually has 21 miles of Infiniband cables, linking its 12,000 quad-core Xeons, with dual 20 Gbit/s interconnects. This currently provides 487 teraflops of Linpack performance, but NASA plans to take this to more than a petaflop in the next two years, and to 10 petaflops by 2012.
NASA previously used Itanium processors which might have more powerful individual cores than Xeons, and passed over IBM Power6 chips, because quad-core Xeons offer more "bang for the buck" and let NASA choose how much RAM per core to use. The machine was built by SGI.
Digg
Slashdot
Del.ici.ous
Stumble
Reddit
