NASA Ames is getting some new big iron
245 Teraflop Altix system from SGI
to be followed by the Petaflop Pleiades, also SGI architecture with Intel CPUs.
Given SGIs bankruptcy and continuous hemorrhage of cash, this will get interesting.
Now if they could only settle on a security system that was both secure and enables users to actually use the system...
Plan, allegedly, is to scale this up to 10 Petaflops in the surprisingly near future. like 2012.
At last, a use is found for the Hanger #1.
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... "10 Petaflops in the surprisingly near future. like 2012."
I remember an early system, we thought it was fantastic and entirely too futuristic for words, had something like 5KHz cpu, 50KB (yes kilo bytes) RAM and a hard drive with 10MBs, more room than all the documents and programs anyone I knew could imagine typing in. This was mid-70s I think.
Now you get more computing power in some wristwatches. The shift in about 40 years.
It wouldn't surprise me to find that we have pentaflop pocket calculators in a decade.
A decade after that they come in cereal boxed as a prize.
Onward and upward.
People who go into security (at the day-to-day procedural level) tend to have the mentality that anytime anyone does anything, it's probably a threat, so I think a security system that enables users to use the system would be an oxymoron from their point of view.
Is SGI really hemorrhaging cash still? I had the impression they were now a relatively small, boutique company making supercomputers. Kind of like Cray used to be.
Don't know, the HPC article claims they have big fractional quarterly losses and declining revenues - if they can ship their revenues must go up, and I'd suspect some three-letter agencies are also buying - unless they've all gone to alpha-7 for now - those chips must be going somewhere.
I use an Altix based on Itanium-2 on a daily basis. I love it. It's not as fast as the opteron cluster we have here but it's great for reliably going to high-precision calculations (yay thesis) and the shared memory access is extraordinarily useful for doing, say, large FFTs or large in-memory analysis.