At NASA Ames, They're Redefining 'Supercomputer' (61 Terraflops!)

NASA has a new toy to play with. Ames Research Center (just down the road from my house) has a new super-computer made up of 10,240 Intel Itanium 2 processors. The system should be completed by october. When complete it will be the fastest in the world at 61 Teraflops . I call the first DOOM 3 game The intent is to use it for the calculation intensive computational fluid dynamics.

In a computing world where speed is measured in teraflops, NASA Ames Research Center had a problem every PC owner has experienced: Not enough speed.

It's solving that problem with the installation of 20 interconnected Silicon Graphics Inc. Altix 512-processor systems, giving it a total of 10,240 Intel Itanium 2 Linux processors. The result is an estimated 10-fold increase in NASA's supercomputing capacity.

Maintaining a pace of about two processors a week, the installation should be completed in October and the system doing productive work in November, says Walter Brooks, chief of NASA's Advanced Supercomputing Div. It is being installed in a 20-year-old facility near Ames' best-known landmark--the 80 X 120-ft. wind tunnel.

"They've already defined projects that we can't do," Brooks says of the research teams. "This system has 61 teraflops peak, and many of these guys have defined projects that take 100 teraflops."

/4urtq

[edit on 8-9-2004 by FredT]

Originally posted by FredT
NASA has a new toy to play with. Ames Research Center (just down the road from my house) has a new super-computer made up of 10,240 Intel Itanium 2 processors. The system should be completed by october. When complete it will be the fastest in the world at 61 Teraflops

. I call the first DOOM 3 game

The intent is to use it for the calculation intensive computational fluid dynamics.

I read about an IBM project for Ames Research several months ago. Was it 61 tbs/sec? I forgot. But when I was reading the article, I thought it was,, too.
Damn, you beat me to Doom!

Originally posted by Intelearthling
I read about an IBM project for Ames Research several months ago. Was it 61 tbs/sec? I forgot. But when I was reading the article, I thought it was,

, too.
Damn, you beat me to Doom!

Aparently it is 21 flops faster than the the current champ. I was talking to someone about it and he seemed to think that it could be expanded as needed and that they developed its room with that in mind. If they need more power they can just add processing modules and ramp up peak speed. I wonder what the real top end is. I mean at some point its fast enough for whatever you would want. I wonder if the NSA is jealous?

I wonder if a real-time raytracing 3d engine could be made on such a powerful computer.

Wow, Sounds like it'll take up quit a bit of space, They better have the A/C on high to keep this sucker cool. Either that or they built it IN the wind tunnel (A 150mph fan could do the job quit nicely).