'Big Mac' supercomputer one of world's fastest

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Everyone Should Care!

Sue,
Everyone should care about this event at Va Tech. Why? Because there are HUGE problems around the world that need to be solved (cancer, AIDS and the like you mentioned) that can?t be solved because of computation barriers. For example, it can currently take 1000 computers, 1-day to compute one nanosecond of protein flow analysis.

The Va Tech cluster represents a huge step forward in computation power. This team pulled together an 8 Teraflop computer in only a few months for $5M dollars. That is only $600K per Teraflop. Only two years ago there were only 12 computers in the whole world that ranked over 1 Teraflop and these systems cost on average greater than $20M per teraflop. It is now possible for almost any university or lab or company in the world to deploy HUGE computing power to solve really complex issues.

How is this done? InfiniBand (yes, I?m at Mellanox an InfiniBand company) and really fast processors in almost any server today create an inflection point in computing. InfiniBand is a very fast (10 Gb/sec) interconnect enables today?s industry standard servers (anyone?s, Apple, Intel, AMD, etc) to be clustered together (with open software) to create massive amounts of compute power.

So, now it is possible that a few people can get together and create what was unimaginable compute power, just two years ago, within a budget that MANY can afford. This means more researchers with more compute power on the issues that need to be addressed.

b.

Posted by: Byran   Posted on: 10/24/03 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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