Its been announced today by the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) and University of Texas that they are currently creating a 10-Petaflop supercomputer named Stampede that will be equipped with Intel’s 50-core processors capable of 10-Petaflop (or 10,000 trillion operations per second).
The new Stampede supercomputer will be arriving in 2013 and will be one of the world’s most powerful computers for scientific and financial applications. When finished, Stampede will be equipped with several thousand Dell “Zeus” servers, each server having dual 8-core processors from the forthcoming Intel Xeon processor E5 Family (formerly code-named “Sandy Bridge-EP”) and each server will have 32 gigabytes of memory.
Advanced Processor Technology
Also inside will be an Intel chip design codenamed “Knights Corner,” which will house more than 50 processor cores, providing 8 petaflops of performance. This chip is part of Intel’s Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture, which is designed to deliver high performance for highly parallel applications. The Knights Corner processors are particularly well-suited for tasks that require massive computational power, such as simulations in physics, climate modeling, and complex financial calculations.
Additionally, Stampede will offer 128 next-generation NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs) for remote visualization. These GPUs will enable researchers to visualize complex data sets in real-time, which is crucial for fields like medical research, where understanding the structure of proteins can lead to breakthroughs in drug development. The inclusion of 16 Dell servers with 1 terabyte of shared memory and 2 GPUs each will further enhance its capability for large data analysis, making it a versatile tool for a wide range of scientific inquiries.
Data Storage and Performance
A high-performance Lustre file system will be integrated for data-intensive computing. Lustre is a type of parallel distributed file system, generally used for large-scale cluster computing. It is designed to handle the high I/O demands of supercomputing applications, ensuring that data can be read and written at extremely high speeds. This is essential for applications that generate or process large volumes of data, such as genomic sequencing or large-scale simulations.
Altogether, Stampede will have a peak performance of 10 petaflops, 272 terabytes (272,000 gigabytes) of total memory, and 14 petabytes (14 million gigabytes) of disk storage. To put this into perspective, 14 petabytes of storage is equivalent to about 700,000 Blu-ray discs. This immense storage capacity will allow researchers to store and analyze vast amounts of data, facilitating breakthroughs in various scientific fields.
The Stampede supercomputer is expected to be a game-changer in the world of high-performance computing. Its advanced architecture and immense computational power will enable researchers to tackle problems that were previously unsolvable. For example, climate scientists will be able to run more accurate models to predict future climate changes, while biologists can simulate the behavior of complex biological systems at an unprecedented scale.
Source: : Hot Hardware
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