16,000 Hammers in Sandia supercomputer

Phantasm66 · Oct 21, 2002

16,000 Hammers in Sandia supercomputer

By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Posted: 21/10/2002 at 20:55 GMT

Cray and Sandia National Labs in New Mexico have jointly announced a supercomputer that will feature 16,000 AMD Opteron CPUs. "Red Storm" will be used for nuclear simulations and will come on tap in 2004.

It's good news for Cray, which demonstrates that it can sell into its traditional government markets using commodity PC systems. And even better news for AMD, which delayed Opteron until next year. In the case of the latter, it's particularly welcome, as AMD lost so much money in the past quarter, it requires a dedicated supercomputer to count all that red ink.

Intel's Itanium2 already delivers the SPEC performance that AMD can't deliver until next year. So there has to be a reason for the labs going for AMD?

"Opteron is technically more satisfactory," a spokesman for the labs told us. There were three specific reasons, he added:-

The team liked the pipelining in Opteron, which gave them "multiple results per cycle"; they liked the 64bit architecture, and they liked the bandwidth offered by HyperTransport, which allowed them to build a more tightly coupled machine.

source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/3/27718.html

see also: http://www.sandia.gov/news-center/news-releases/2002/comp-soft-math/redstorm.html

Vehementi · Oct 21, 2002

Putting UD on that beast would be a bit of fun now wouldn't it?

PanicX · Oct 22, 2002

Originally posted by Vehementi
Putting UD on that beast would be a bit of fun now wouldn't it?

Why's that? It'd only run on one of the processors anyway.

Vehementi · Oct 22, 2002

Originally posted by PanicX
Why's that? It'd only run on one of the processors anyway.

SETI@Home then. I don't know if I can run it 16k times however...

Oh well!

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16,000 Hammers in Sandia supercomputer

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