HLRB II (SGI Altix 4700) computer is fired up...

[BGonaSTICK]

This baby is a bit special, and makes Deep Thought look stupid.

It's based on the humble Intel 1.6GHz - 533MHz Front Side Bus Itanium2 processor.

That though, is where similarity with your PC ends...

This year, they are just warming it up. Next year they will double it's power.
The supercomputer has recently been installed at the Leibniz Day Center (LRZ) in Garching near Munich.

Overall Characteristics for Phase 1

Total number of cores (processors)
4096

Peak performance of the entire system
26.2 TFlop/s

Total size of memory for entire system
17.5 TByte

Direct Attached Disks
300 TByte

Network Attached Disks
40 Tbyte

Granularity

Number of compute nodes
16

Number of processors per compute node
256

Number of cores per processor
1

Total Number of cores
4096

Processor

Processor type Intel Itanium2 Madison 9M

Clock rate
1.6 GHz

Number of Floating Point Operations per clock
4 (=2 FMAs)

Peak performance of a core
6.4 GFlop/s

Peakperformance of the entire system
26.2 TFlop/s

Max. number of Instructions per clock tick
6

Peak number of instructions per second of one core (Gip/s)
9.6 Gip/s

Number of FP Registers
128

Memory

Memory per core
4 GByte (8 GByte on interactive node)

Total size of memory for entire system
17.5 TByte

Clock rate of frontside bus (FSB)
533 MHz

Peak bandwidth to local memory of one core
8.5 GByte/s

Total bandwidth to local memory of the entire system
34816 GByte/s

Latency to local memory
approx. 210 cycles

Internal Interconnect

Connection network type
NUMAlink

Number of (bidirectional) links per core
2

Bandwidth of one link (bidirectional)
6.4 Gbyte/s

MPI latency
1-6 µs

Disks

Direct attached disks (Pseudo Temporary Files)
Characteristics: Few, but large files; high bandwidth

Size
300 TByte

Bandwidth to disks
38.4 Gbyte/s

Networked attached disks (Home Directories)
Characteristics: Many, but small files; high transaction rate

Size
40 TByte

Bandwidth to disks
600 Mbyte/s

Environment

Footprint
24 m x 12 m

Total weight
103 metric tons

Total electrical power
~1000 kVA

[fergycool]

Hi,

Altix servers are pretty cool. They're SGI's last ditch attempt to save the company by switching to Linux instead of IRIX. Since the company is more or less bankrupt, the future of these machines is in doubt. But over the last year they have been a reasonably cheap way to get some pretty serious horsepower behind your calculations!!

Cheers
Ferg

[BGonaSTICK]

I can remember when all the best-dressed supercomputers had nice comfy seats round the outside... :roflmao:

[fergycool]

Originally Posted by BGonaSTICK

I can remember when all the best-dressed supercomputers had nice comfy seats round the outside... :roflmao:

Well I don't know about that, but I reckon with all those Itaniums you could toast yourself some muffins

[BGonaSTICK]

LOL - a snap of the Cray-1 at the Science Museum, London. With seating!

Loads of info on my favourite supercomputer at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1

Cray recently announced the creation of the world's most powerful supercomputer based on AMD's Opteron:

Originally Posted by Cray Inc

Cray Signs $200 Million Contract to Deliver World's Largest Supercomputer to Oak Ridge

SEATTLE, WA, June 15, 2006 - Cray Inc. (Nasdaq NM: CRAYD) announced today that they have signed a multi-year contract with the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to provide the world's first petaflops-speed (1,000 trillion floating-point operations per second) supercomputer.

The total contract, including systems and services, is valued at about $200 million and calls for progressive upgrades to ORNL's existing Cray XT3™ supercomputer. This system will be upgraded to dual-core processors later this year, accelerating peak speed from 25 teraflops (25 trillion calculations per second) to 50 teraflops. Further upgrades will increase the performance to 100 teraflops, planned in late 2006, and to 250 teraflops, planned in late 2007.

ORNL is then expected to install a next-generation Cray supercomputer in late 2008. This system, currently code-named 'Baker,' is designed to deliver peak performance of one petaflops, making it roughly three times faster than any existing computer in the world. All systems provided for in this contract will utilize current and future versions of the AMD Opteron processor.