The US Army has asked IBM to provide a high-performance
computing system using Opteron processors from Advanced Micro
Devices (AMD), in a project that aims to create one of the fastest
supercomputers in the world.
The 2,304-CPU system is also seen as a win for AMD as it manages
to get its 64-bit x86 chips in a major high-performance computing
system.
The system will be based in the Army Research Laboratory Major
Shared Resource Center for use by US Department of Defense
researchers for testing and developing of advanced military
systems, according to IBM.
The cluster will use 1186 IBM eServer e325 nodes, each of which
will be fitted with dual 2.2-GHz Opteron processors and run
Novell's SuSE Linux operating system.
They will be connected using Myricom's Myrinet networking
equipment and boast a computing capacity of 10Tflops, IBM said.
The company added that it expects the cluster to be one of the
20 fastest supercomputers in the world.
The system is due to be delivered in September and the deal is
valued at "tens of millions" of dollars, an IBM spokeswoman
said.
David Turek, IBM's vice-president of Deep Computing, said the
army selected AMD processors for this system because they mapped
with their existing technologies and budget.
"What we have learned is that these [high-performance] systems
are so diverse and that there is no such thing as one size fits
all, which is why we offer a range of technologies," he said.
The cluster's future home is one of four supercomputing sites
run by the defence department's High Performance Computing
Modernization Office, which announced in March that the shared
resource centre planned to up its computing capacity by 15Tflops
with the addition of a 2,132-CPU Linux NetworX Evolocity II system
running Intel's Xeon 3.6-GHz processors.
In March it also said that it planned to add a Silicon Graphics
256-processor, single-system-image Altix system, which will add
2Tflops to the high-performance computing centre.
The centre is adding the systems as part of an initiative to
modernise the defence department's high-performance computing
capabilities and represent the first major commodity-based
symmetric multiprocessor supercomputers used by the centre, the
Army Research Laboratory said.
The most recent army supercomputer win comes one week after IBM
said the Department of Defense selected the company to deploy
high-performance systems for its Naval Oceanographic Office Major
Shared Resource Center.
Once deployed, the company said it expects the systems to
include one of the fastest supercomputer clusters in the world. The
systems will use IBM eServer p655 systems and be based on the
company's Power4+ processors.
Scarlet Pruitt writes for IDG News
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