World's biggest Linux supercomputer to aid black hole research
World's biggest Linux supercomputer to aid black hole research
Silicon Graphics has built the world's biggest Linux supercomputer, which will be used to help try to unravel the mystery of black holes.
Silicon Graphics has built the world's biggest Linux supercomputer, which will be used to help try to unravel the mystery of black holes.
The cosmic vortexes have long held the fascination of eminent thinkers such as Stephen Hawking, who coincidentally reversed his opinion on black holes which he held for more than 30 years, saying that he now believed black holes can release matter and are not completely destructive.
The U.S. National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) purchased the system, which consists of 1,024 Intel Itanium 2 processors running the Linux operating system, 3 terabytes of globally accessible memory, and 370 terabytes of SGI InfiniteStorage that will serve as the Center's shared file system, accessible by other high-performance computing resources within NCSA.
With a peak performance of more than 6 teraflops (six trillion floating point operations per second), the system will open new research frontiers for scientists in a wide range of disciplines. Cosmologists will be able to undertake large-scale simulations of the evolution of the universe, while atmospheric scientists access the system for on-demand data analysis in response to severe weather.
"The SGI Altix system will offer researchers a unique configuration that is not currently part of the cyber infrastructure available to academic researchers," says NCSA interim director Rob Pennington. "This system will make it possible to handle very large computational applications, create and retain large datasets and databases in memory, and enable real-time, interactive data analysis."
"Researchers will no longer need to spend time ensuring that their challenges fit within the confines of a system's memory or capability," says Dave Parry, SGI senior vice president of the Servers and Platform Group. "Instead they will be challenged only by their efforts in creating new approaches to solving bigger problems."
"The Itanium 2-based Altix supercomputer is a powerful addition to NCSA's high performance computing center," said Jason Waxman, Intel director of marketing for the Enterprise Product Group. "The processing power of the Itanium 2-based system will give researchers the ability to see and analyse the universe in ways that were not even possible a few years ago."
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