NASA to build 10,000-processor Linux computer

[Renew Deal]

Agency will build largest ever supercomputer based on SGI's 512-processor Altix computers

By Robert McMillan, IDG News Service July 28, 2004

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has given the green light to a project that will build the largest ever supercomputer based on Silicon Graphics Inc.'s (SGI) 512-processor Altix computers.

Called Project Columbia, the 10,240-processor system will be used by researchers at the Advanced Supercomputing Facility at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

Scientists will use Columbia to design equipment, simulate future space missions and model weather patterns. A portion of the $160 million system will also be made available to other government agencies and educational facilities, said Bill Thigpen, manager of Project Columbia. "We need to look at working with other agencies to provide them with access to this system because it is a unique system," he said.

What makes Project Columbia unique is the size of the multiprocessor Linux systems, or nodes, that it clusters together. It is common for supercomputers to be built of thousands of two-processor nodes, but the Ames system uses SGI's NUMAlink switching technology and ProPack Linux operating system enhancements to connect 512-processor nodes, each of which will have more than 1,000GB of memory.
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http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/07/28/HNnasalinux_1.html

[Liberal Veteran]

1. Wow....KDE is really becoming a resource hog, isn't it?

:)

[ret5hd]

2. LOL...

man, just think how fast the cards will move playing freecell!

[enki23]

3. so is this SGI's last big hurrah?

.

[phantom power]

4. jeez, you'd think

I can't believe they're going with SGI. What the hell are they thinking?

[enki23]

5. i'm sure there was some shady dealing going on somewhere

we just had to pay something like five grand to get a motherboard replaced on a twenty thousand dollar sgi workstation. just for the part, that is. and the machine is consistently outperformed by a little two thousand dollar workstation running linux, now that we have a linux version of SYBYL. just as good at displaying the 3d protein models, and far better at running the calculations.

sgi can't be long for this world, at that rate.

[phantom power]

6. I was saying that 4 years ago

They must be living on some kind of legacy-system biz model. And, maybe some combination of customers' upper-management ignorance and old reputation.

[Dogmudgeon]

7. Ten thousand processors!

Think of all the porn that the NASA engineers will be downloading!

--bkl