Intel's "Thunder" cluster- 20 TFLOPS

Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
Well looks like Big Mac whould be recieving some competition.



LINK



Quote:

The Earth Simulator, however, cost about $600 million to build vs. about $20 million for a supercomputer that Intel is helping build at Lawrence Livermore Labs. That supercomputer, called Thunder, will be deployed for basic scientific research, including electro-magnetic modeling.





Intel said Thunder should be operational in January and should clock in at about 20 teraflops. The system will contain 3,840 Itanium processors and Intel believes it will be the world's second fastest supercomputer.



Damn.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 12
    alcimedesalcimedes Posts: 5,486member
    too bad they missed the deadline.



    by this time next year, there will be a pile more Mac clusters.
  • Reply 2 of 12
    wasn't there just 2200 processors in big mac? versus almost 4000 in that one? I guess its just a matter of money. I bet Virginia Tech got probably the most bang for their buck in the whole industry.
  • Reply 3 of 12
    alcimedesalcimedes Posts: 5,486member
    well, to put it in perspective, they spent about $1 million per Tflop, vs. the Big Mac's $500k per Tflop.
  • Reply 4 of 12
    You could build 4 big macs for the price of that one Intel computer. Even if the big macs don't scale linearly, you could at least expect more than half efficiency. At 2/3 of the current efficiency, 4 big macs would wipe the floor with that thing. For the mathematically impaired, that's nearly 30 TFlops for the price of 20.
  • Reply 5 of 12
    Big Mac mops the floor with every other super computer in the world, except two. For my money I would rather have the Big Mac (not that I have 5 million bucks). It's amazing to me that they were able to build Big Mac in a few short months, get it up and running, and have it become the third fastest supercomputer in the world, all for a fraction of the cost of every computer in the top 20. And they built it with revision A computers too! Just think if they had waited till this coming summer, building that sucker with 1100 3.0 ghz G5s. Talk about moping the floor.
  • Reply 6 of 12
    powerdocpowerdoc Posts: 8,123member
    For Intel the only way to sell itaniums chips, is to build clusters ...
  • Reply 7 of 12
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Powerdoc

    For Intel the only way to sell itaniums chips, is to buid clusters ...



    ...and thus make one air-conditioning supplier very happy
  • Reply 8 of 12
    tidristidris Posts: 214member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Placebo

    Well looks like Big Mac whould be recieving some competition.



    LINK







    Damn.




    The reason the BigMac is in third place is because there wasn't enough money to add additional G5s to the cluster. I don't see why it wouldn't be possible to have a G5-based supercomputer in first place, given enough money.
  • Reply 9 of 12
    outsideroutsider Posts: 6,008member
    I wouldn't worry too much about Intel dominance in the super computer field. IBM is working on a PowerPC based super computer using 440 core chips that is gunning for #1 on the list by a wide margin too. They have a washing machine sized prototype that ranks #73 at the moment.



    http://news.com.com/2100-7337-5107422.html?tag=nl
  • Reply 10 of 12
    yevgenyyevgeny Posts: 1,148member
    Nothing to see here... Intel is just pushing Itanium chips out to supercomputers since they certainly can't sell them as workstations or servers.



    However, it is quite interesting to see that chip for chip, the G5 is faster than the Itanium. It also costs less.



    Itanium CPUs are kind of like AOL disks. Too much quantity, too little demand and a product that nobody really wants.
  • Reply 11 of 12
    bungebunge Posts: 7,329member
    F.U.D.
  • Reply 12 of 12
    Well, if you want to toss out large numbers, Big Mac does 17 Tflops theoretically. I'm sure that "Thunder" does 20 max as well.



    we shall see.
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