IBM and the US-based National Centre for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois intend to create academia`s fastest Linux supercomputer, running at two teraflops.
Intended for use by researchers to study some of the most fundamental questions of science - such as the nature of gravitational waves first predicted by Albert Einstein in his Theory of Relativity - the monster will cluster more than 600 IBM eServer xSeries servers running Red Hat and TurboLinux. Myricom`s Myrinet cluster interconnect network will be used to tie the servers together.
"We believe that Linux clusters will soon be the most widely used architecture for parallel computing, and that these two clusters from IBM are the best way to deliver terascale performance," comments Dan Reed, director of NCSA and the National Computational Science Alliance.
"The explosion of the open source community, the maturity of clustering software, and the enthusiasm of the scientific community all tell us that Linux clusters are the future of high-performance computing."
The first cluster, to be installed in February by IBM Global Services, will be based on IBM eServer x330 thin servers, each with two 1GHz Intel Pentium III processors.
The second cluster, to be installed mid-year, will be one of the first to use Intel`s next-generation 64-bit Itanium processor and will run TurboLinux.
Reed adds that Linux clusters provide users with a single, easy-to-use computing environment that applies to single-user desktop workstations, small research clusters, and the largest terascale systems.
"These IBM Linux clusters will enable scientists to focus more on the results of their research initiatives, freeing them from the additional burden of building their own clusters and writing code to support their heavy computational demands," says Dave Turek, VP of Deep Computing at IBM. "We are seeing an increase in demand for this type of empowering technology within the scientific community."
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