Blow Lies Out Your Wazoo Dan - Re: "Are they having any luck getting the Itanium to compile in less than 2 hours? "
IBM and the National Science Foundation have no problem !!
Thursday August 9, 6:54 pm Eastern Time
Natl Science Foundation to fund $53 mln supercomputer
By Duncan Martell
SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 9 (Reuters) - The National Science Foundation said it will spend $53 million to build a massive computing grid that will be the most powerful of its kind ever completed and could lead to ground-breaking research that would have otherwise taken years, if not decades, to complete.
Called the Distributed Terascale Facility, or DTF, it will be used by four U.S. research centers for research in areas including molecular modeling for detecting diseases, cures and drug discovery, research on alternative energy sources, climate and atmospheric simulations, among others.
The current grid, which is the latest example of distributed computing that is becoming increasing popular, will be able to process 13.6 trillion calculations per second and will boast some 600 terabytes of data storage, the equivalent of 146 million full-length novels. To put that computational power in perspective, it would take one person with a calculator about 10 million years to tabulate the number of calculations the proposed grid could in a single second.
``All these (scientific) instruments are producing enormous amounts of scientific data and the challenge is mining these data to get some scientific insights,'' said Daniel Reed, director for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, or NCSA, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on a conference call. ``This will transform, we believe, the way science and engineering research is done.''
Once completed in late 2002, it will be the largest, most comprehensive computing infrastructure ever built for scientific research. DTF will be more than a thousand times faster than IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer, which defeated chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1996.
The DTF, which will be connected using Qwest Communications International Inc.'s (NYSE:Q - news) 40-gigabit-per-second network, will be built by International Business Machines Corp.(NYSE:IBM - news), using Intel Corp.'s (NasdaqNM:INTC - news) Itanium microprocessors and the Linux operating system. More than a thousand IBM servers and 3,300 next-generation Itanium McKinley chips will comprise the DTF.
The other research institutions involved in the project are the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California at San Diego, Argonne National Laboratory, and the California Institute of Technology.
Unlike traditional supercomputers, which are typically housed at a single location, grids allow for pools of computing resources by connecting multiple supercomputers that are often in different locations via the Internet using open-source protocols from Globus. Globus is an organization seeking to set standards for grid computing similar to the standards that were set up to run the World Wide Web.
Because of the open-source standards in creating the grid, a large benefit is the ability to plug other supercomputers and systems that aren't based on Intel chips and Linux into the DTF to boost performance and compute capacity even more.
IBM has established itself as a leader in the emerging arena of grid computing, in which computing power becomes a resource and a service, much as with an electric utility. Users, for example, would pay for as much of the computing resources that they use, harkening back to time-sharing on old supercomputers, but modernized by super-high-speed data networks.
``The goal is not to sell each of the companies in the Fortune 1000 a $50 million computer, which would be nice for us, but it's what's the best way to distribute compute power into the hands of our customers,'' said David Turek, vice president of emerging technologies for IBM.
``You simply focus on getting the work done and, in the analogy of an electric utility, you don't have to worry about how your turbine is spinning,'' Turek said.
While big for IBM, the win is also of note for Intel, the world's largest semiconductor maker. Itanium is Intel's first foray into super-high-end computing, and the company is seeking to establish Itanium as a formidable force in a part of the high-tech market place now dominated by rival Sun Microsystems Inc. (NasdaqNM:SUNW - news) and IBM. |
