The National Center for Supercomputing Applications
(NCSA) plans to use more than 1,450 Dell servers in a powerful
Linux supercomputer.
Linux is growing in popularity among supercomputer designers as
an operating system for high-performance computing.
IBM and Fujitsu recently unveiled plans to build Linux
supercomputers that promised to be the most powerful Linux systems
yet devised, until Dell's announcement at Linuxworld in San
Francisco.
The NCSA will use 1,280 Dell PowerEdge servers, each with two
3.06GHz Xeon DP processors from Intel, in a cluster running Red Hat
Linux, Dell said. The cluster will also use 106 PowerEdge servers
for I/O services and storage.
The cluster will produce theoretical peak performance of 17.7
trillion floating point operations per second (T Flops), which
would make it the third most powerful supercomputer in the world
based on the latest
Top 500 list of
the world's supercomputers.
The NCSA cluster is scheduled to come online later this year at
the NCSA facilities at the University of Illinois.
IBM's Linux supercomputer will use Advanced Micro Devices'
Opteron processor and Intel's Itanium processor to deliver peak
theoretical performance of 11.2T Flops.
Fujitsu said it will deliver 12.4T Flops of peak theoretical
performance. Both systems are scheduled to be released next
March.
Cray will follow with a Linux supercomputer using Opteron
processors which is expected to deliver 40T Flops of peak
theoretical performance when it is released late in 2004 for Sandia
National Laboratories.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory at the University of
California operates the fastest Linux supercomputer, which was
built with clustering technology from Linux Networx. It delivers
11.1 T Flops of peak theoretical performance.
Tom Krazit writes for IDG News
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