The Energy Department’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory will start to take delivery on a computer at least as three times more powerful than any now in operation.
Cray Inc. of Seattle will supply the system, named Baker. It will run approximately 24,000 2.6 Ghz quad-core Opteron processors made by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. The nodes will be housed in 187 liquid-cooled cabinets. The system, which is still in early stages of design, will have either 187 or 400 terabytes of working memory (depending on the cost of memory modules) and from one to 11 petabytes of storage.
Nice, but will it be able to run Vista?
Ah! that should run windows faster than intel based Macs. 🙂
besides bragging rights, what is the point?
Wow. Think of the FPS on Doom!
Will it run Duke Nukem Forever?
Points of interest…
“The system should be operational by 2008,”
“It will run approximately 24,000 2.6 Ghz quad-core Opteron”
“The power company is building a 170 megawatt substation to support this and other ORNL projects”
“Researchers must demonstrate the need for using the computer, and the lab will look for those jobs that are too large for other systems.”
The computer’s first job (in 2008) will be to calculate a delivery date for Vista.
11 million gigs of HD?
How long until it gets infected and used to store and distribute ripped DVD’s?
mike,
given the defense department is picking up the tab for this monster out of its budget, i’m going to assume that it will be used in the war on terror, which of course makes it money well spent.
seriously though, these things usually get used to model nukes.
😀
//ken
they didn’t say anything about using big ass array of 5 million PCIe video cards in some insane SLI configuration. Have each GPU core handle ONE pixel.
“Would you like to play a game?”
Wouldn’t you rather spend the money simulating a nuclear blast rather than flattening another atoll? A machine like this will certainly be used to simulate and predict higher fidelity nuclear blasts, sub-atomic interactions (smash virtual atoms), and perhaps even hurricane patterns. I can even see this used to create new medications not at the molecular level, but at the atomic. Exciting times.
That computer would make a fantastic server if it’s possible to run linux on it
“That computer would make a fantastic server if it’s possible to run Linux on it”
Well, I highly doubt they’ll use it to run Windows. God, can you imagine what costs there would be just for the 24,000 licenses you’d need?! And I doubt if Windows could scale to 400 terabytes of memory.
While it may not run Linux, my guess is that it’ll run some form of Unix.
A computer such as that could be used to design an even better computer.
As long as it doesn’t say
“You’ve Got Mail”
Imagine the amount of energy to power it and cool it. Use solar power and plop it on a floating iceberg.
Well AMD is making a lot of money, gives them a good name, which means business.
Intel is getting screwed in a way by this.
Yesss, build the world’s fastest computer, then give it to FEMA. Maybe they could program it to watch CNN and alert them if there is something they really ought to know — like if there is a Catogory 5 hurricane heading for US soil.
Oak Ridge is not soley setup for studying radiation and radioactive projects but also chemical and Genetics research as well as astrophysical studies. They are just famous?? for the Manhattan Project.