“At Supercomputing 2005, AMD and Sun today announced that the Tokyo Institute of Technology is creating Japan’s largest supercomputer on a foundation of Sun. The system is based on Sun Fire x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers with 10,480 AMD Opteron processor cores (totaling more than 50 trillion floating point operations per second (teraFLOPS)), Sun and NEC storage technologies and NEC’s integration expertise as well as ClearSpeed’s Advance accelerator boards.”
It will be the largest Supercomputer in Japan, and is expected to be the top 5 in the world.
When I read the title I read it is “Worlds largest supercomputer to be built in Japan”
Also, the article said they will be built with 10,480 processor cores
So they will probably using 2620 dual proc/dual core Sun Fire X4100’s (or a stripped down model)
They retail for ~$7,000 on Suns site (http://www.sun.com/x64/), but I am sure they will be getting a discount.
To build this system at retail price (2620*$7,000), it would cost around 18 million dollars.
I’d be happy with just a couple of those X4100’s
I just got in an X2100 and it’s sweet. Bought my own SATA hd, another 512MB of RAM. The whole thing including rack rails plus my parts was about $1250. It’s a really well designed machine and Solaris 10 x86 is pretty smooth on it. I also tried Fedora Core 4 64-bit and had various problems. I’m looking forward to getting my hands either on a dual core X2100 or a X4100. I think Sun’s got some winners here. I won’t be buying anymore vanilla servers anymore.
It will be the largest Super Computer under the Sun!
Heh heh. Get it? Sun? Oh nevermind.
a) what on earth are they going to do with it and
b) at what point does all the interprocessor communication become a hindrance? How do they circumvent it?
They’re going to have the fastest supercomputer on the planet. Seriously, that’s the idea behind it. Japan (and the Japanese government) wants to have the fastest computer on the planet, and that means they keep having to build bigger and faster ones to keep ahead of the competition.
I’m waiting for someone to actually call a computer “Deep Thought” or “The Milliard Gargantubrain”*, though.
*From “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, by Douglas Adams
can’t the Japs build their own processors? No intention to disrespect Japs (even if I speak like a ww2 vet) but I tought they had the best electronics in the planet. So, why would they need US made Optetrons. Oh well, then it appears that the top supercomputers will remain either, American or built with American parts(Big and powerfull, just the American way)
Cell had many Japan based companies working on it. Suns Rock is co-developed with a japan company and may of the newer hi-end Sparc processors are being co-designed and developed in Japan.
Well, tanks for the detail, but still, I don’t know why was I modded down
edit:And besides, I was talking about the AMD CPUs(Big and powerfull).
Edited 2005-11-16 23:48
“I don’t know why was I modded down”
1. Flamebait directed at the Japenese
2. Opteron’s arent made in the US
If it was IBM, then it wouldn’t be such big deal, IBM is all over the top 500 list, one more wouldn’t make such a huge difference.
For Sun this is a great PR stunt, even if not a big commercial success.
I am surprised they didn’t think of utilizing the Niagara/T2000 boxes, instead. It’s the greatest concentration of CPU power per volume unit, and lowest power consumption, too. We just got one, it’s cold, that’s how cool it is.
I am surprised they didn’t think of utilizing the Niagara/T2000 boxes, instead. It’s the greatest concentration of CPU power per volume unit, and lowest power consumption, too.
Maybe you meant the greatest concentration of integer CPU power per volume unit, because Niagara sucks for floating point. Thus it’s useless for supercomputers.