NASA gets SGI 2048-core Itanium 2 supercomputer

NASA gets SGI 2048-core Itanium 2 supercomputer

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=864

I had a chance to speak with NASA and SGI at the SC07 supercomputing
convention in Reno this week where I saw one of the biggest super
computers in the world. Pictured left is a 1024-core version of the
Altix 4700 and NASA just bought one with twice as many processors
(1024 dual-core Itanium 2 processors) based on the Montecito variant
of Intel's Itanium 2 processor and 4 Terabytes of RAM.

This massive supercomputer is the most powerful single node computer
in the world (based on SPECint_rate2006 and SPECfp_rate2006 database)
and it has one of the largest single system memory pool in the world.
For some applications that simply can't be effectively broken down in
to smaller tasks that a cluster can handle using smaller nodes because
of excessive communications overhead, this is really the only system
that can crunch those hard problems.

To give you some idea how powerful this system is, a 256-core version
of the SGI Altix 4700 has a SPECfp_rate2006 score of 3507 and a
SPECint_rate2006 score of 2970. The biggest 16-core Intel X7350 2.93
GHz server scores 119 on SPECfp_rate2006 and 214 on SPECint_rate2006.
The biggest 16-core AMD Barcelona server has a SPECfp_rate2006 score
of 136 and a SPECint_rate2006 score of 160. A 16-core IBM Power6 has
a SPECfp_rate2006 score of 428 and a SPECint_rate2006 score of 478
though the latest 32-core version probably has double that
performance. But even the Power6 is dwarfed by the 256-core SGI
machine let alone what a 2048-core version can do.

Of course there are plenty of jobs that do break down nicely for
clusters and plenty of jobs that don't need that much single-node
memory. That's why NASA also purchased an Altix "ice" 8200 cluster
using 16 of the racks pictured left. Each one of these racks contains
64 dual-processor Intel XEON x86/x64 servers and 16 of these make a
1024 processor cluster with 4096 XEON CPU cores.

The Altix 8200 rack includes the 20 gbps InfiniBand switches on the
sides for the cluster interconnect and the racks can be chained
together with InfiniBand. NASA has for the most part used very large
shared memory systems like the Altix 4700 above but they've just
started buying the clustered systems.

-----

Neil Rieck
Kitchener/Waterloo/Cambridge,
Ontario, Canada.
http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/





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