Supercomputer aiming for petaflop

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Osiris

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- IBM will build a next-generation supercomputer for the U.S. Energy Department with the potential to achieve a sustained speed of 1,000 trillion calculations per second, or one petaflop, the department said on Wednesday.

The new computer, dubbed "Roadrunner", will be built at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

Congress provided $35 million in fiscal 2006, which ends on September 30, to launch the computer project.

Roadrunner may eventually be used for an Energy Department program that ensures the U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons is safe and reliable without the resumption of underground testing, the department said in a statement.

The machine is to be built entirely from commercially available hardware and based on the Red Hat Linux Version 4.3 operating system, it said.

IBM System x 3755 systems based on AMD Opteron technology will be deployed in conjunction with IBM BladeCenter H systems with Cell technology.


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your probably right, but why reinvent the wheel? Don't they still have to code the processor threading and what not to harness that power?
 
nitestick said:
i'm concerned as to it being "based on RedHat". surely with a budget like that you could afford to get a custom linux from the ground up?
Hasn't IBM been working with RedHat for a while now? I'm sure they want to keep using what they're familiar with and is proven and reliable. Licensing existing code is a lot cheaper than making it yourself, too. Any software company (especially true for games) will tell you that if you can license it, do it. You'll save $ in the long run and a looong time in development.
 
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