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Hardware Technology

Sandia's Red Storm Detailed Architecture 18

Roland Piquepaille writes "Bill Camp & Jim Tomkins, from Sandia National Laboratories, have published a 77-page document about the architecture of the Red Storm supercluster being built by Cray Inc. The new nickname for the 40 teraflops system is "Thor's Hammer." Please read the full presentation if you have the time (PDF format, 3.54 MB). This technical analysis gives you the major characteristics of the system which will be operational by August 2004. With its 108 compute cabinets and its 10,368 compute node processors (AMD Opteron running at 2.0 GHz), it is expected to reach 20 teraflops on MP-Linpack. The report also looks at scalability and reliability, which are essential for a sytem which will be expanded to 30,000 processors in the future."
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Sandia's Red Storm Detailed Architecture

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  • by Geno Z Heinlein ( 659438 ) on Thursday October 30, 2003 @01:31AM (#7345156)
    The new nickname for the 40 teraflops system is "Thor's Hammer."

    In related news, Sandia National Laboratories has laid off all but one of its Jaffa technicians, citing diplomatic and security concerns.
  • They may have a Very Large Computer, so very large, that it isn't even applicable for "..a beowolf cluster of those", but I can not take it seriously that the presentation is so incredibly ugly. And in Comic Sans...
  • Imagine (Score:1, Redundant)

    by Konster ( 252488 )
    Imagine a Beowulf cluster of...

    er, wait! Nevermind!
  • network bandwidth (Score:4, Insightful)

    by martin ( 1336 ) <`moc.liamg' `ta' `cesxam'> on Thursday October 30, 2003 @04:42AM (#7345739) Journal
    AS per usual the difficult but of clusters (esp at this level), isn't the code (quote "can easily be done" at the right level of efficiency), or physically linking the boxes,,,

    but making the network linking up the thing.

    # Sustained file system bandwidth of 50 GB/s for each color
    # Sustained external network bandwidth of 25 GB/s for each color

    wow! That's not peak, but sustained..for me that's the impressive bit.

  • It's pretty impressive.
    2 megawatts and 3000 sq. ft. is quite good.

    frightning, but given the power, quite good.
    Imagine the UPS.

    on the other hand... "100 hour MTBI is desirable"
    Ack! It is hoped that it won't crash more than
    once every three days? That is up from 40 hours
    on the current one. oh. They're putting in lots of
    RAS features, and they still can't target higher than that. depressing.

    custom interconnect. That is the exciting part.
    It looks like a lot of fun. The directions are good
    and make sense.
    • on the other hand... "100 hour MTBI is desirable"
      Ack! It is hoped that it won't crash more than
      once every three days?


      I'm sure they're talking about a single node failure, not the whole machine. Most people aren't running jobs on more than a few hundred processors, so a compute node failing will take out only one of a few dozen running jobs. And it's more like having your program crash, anyway; resubmit your job and it will simply run on a different set of nodes.

      My question is: what is this operating
  • "Thor's Hammer"? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Resound ( 673207 ) on Thursday October 30, 2003 @09:32AM (#7346952)
    Why not go all the way and call it Mjollnir? (and while they're at it,nickname the two head techs "Brok" and "Eitri")
  • The new nickname for the 40 teraflops system is "Thor's Hammer".

    Ah, curious. I guess what goes around comes around. But, shouldn't it be "Thor's Hammers"? It's got 10,368 Hammers [amd.com], y'know.

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