Kirk Pearson's Weblog

Sun grid computing will be used to design next generation of nuclear reactors

Nothing illustrates Sun's phrase "The Network Is The Computer" better than grid computing, in which a networked "power grid" of computers acts as a single computer to solve a single, large problem. In the past few years we have read and heard much about the promise of grid computing, but we haven't seen many actual applications of it. I just found a news story, posted today on Yahoo!, which describes an impressive practical application. Sun and the U.S. Department of Energy are creating a computing environment with Sun hardware and Sun's N1 Grid Engine software for the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory to use in designing the Department of Energy's Generation IV nuclear reactors. The 230 Sun Fire(TM) V20z servers in the grid will produce 2 TeraFLOPs/sec (2 trillion floating-point operations per second) of computing power, more than 7 times the power of the INEEL's existing, expensive, custom mainframe computers, and enough to rank "the INEEL datacenter as one of the world's top 150 supercomputing sites."

As a comparison of CPU power, one Intel Pentium 4 2.2 GHz CPU produces about 4400 MegaFLOPs/sec (or 4.4 GigaFLOPs/sec or 0.0044 TeraFLOPs/sec), and SETI@home's network of distributed computers is currently producing 58.8 TeraFLOPs/sec.