Today, the University of Zurich (UZH) announced they will be deploying
a new supercomputer in late summer 2009, based on 576 Sun Blade servers
powered by next-generation Intel® Xeon® processors (codenamed Nehalem).
The supercomputer will be one of the most powerful computers ever to
have been operated by a single university. If commissioned today, the
new machine would be ranked approximately 50th on the Top500 list and
would also be one of the largest high-performance computers in
Switzerland. Today's announcement builds on other HPC deployments we
announced at
Supercomputing, which will also be based on the next-generation Intel
Xeon processor.
The planned HPC cluster is unique due to its compact design, efficient
QDR InfiniBand network, ingenious cooling system, fast and
high-capacity storage systems and the fact that it uses the very latest
generation of Intel CPUs. The cluster will also take advantage of the
Lustre parallel file system.
The new supercomputer will be used to determine not only the behavior of
individual molecules, but of entire
molecular systems. The high-performance machine is anticipated in the fields of nanotechnology, systems biology,
astrophysics, cosmology and physical chemistry; it will soon be
possible, for example, to determine how planets, stars and galaxies
emerge out of the so-called "primordial soup." The new supercomputer
will also be the main technology used to interpret the findings of the
Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organisation for Nuclear
Research (CERN).
In a single day, the 50-teraflop high-performance computer will be
capable of performing processes that would take an individual PC 10
years. It will also facilitate other scientific calculations not
possible using current computer equipment. The new supercomputer will
offer performance levels 10 times higher than those of the three
existing supercomputers.
If you've brushed up on your German recently, you can see the entire UZH press release here. =)
For more information on Sun's HPC solutions, visit www.sun.com/hpc.
What OS will it be running?
Posted by Richard Friedman on January 16, 2009 at 11:33 AM PST #
Wow!!!!! Really amazing news.. Helping scientists crack the mystery behind "primordial soup" and help them analyze LHC results.... Fantastic.. Wish I was one component of that Super computer.
Posted by Karthick on January 18, 2009 at 08:33 PM PST #
It'll be running SLES 10
Posted by Wolfgang Volkart on January 19, 2009 at 12:33 AM PST #
@Wolfgang Volkart: Hardly possible.
@Richard: You should read about such 'systems', and you will know the possiblities.
Posted by Shiki on January 19, 2009 at 11:29 AM PST #