Super fast Linux supercomputer goes online

10 September 2003 News

The US Department of Energy's (DoE) Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has powered up the country's fastest unclassified supercomputer - a 11,8 teraflops behemoth that will be used for scientific research.

The laboratory's 11,8 teraflops industry-standard HP Integrity system came to full operating power last month, marking the next advance in high-performance computing designed to enable new insights in the environmental and molecular sciences. Based on peak performance, the PNNL machine is the fifth fastest system in the world and is the fastest unclassified computer operating in the US.

The supercomputer draws its speed and computing power from nearly 2000 next-generation Intel Itanium-2 processors (code-named Madison), that run on industry-standard HP Integrity servers running Linux. Linking the Intel Itanium2 chips is a Quadrics interconnect that provides communication between processors and allows scientists to sustain a high performance level.

The huge system is the world's fastest supercomputer based on the Linux operating system and is the biggest machine ever built using Intel's 64-bit architecture, according to the DoE.

The PNNL supercomputer is housed in the Molecular Science Computing Facility of the William R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a DoE scientific user facility located at PNNL in Richland, Washington. Scientists from around the country can access the supercomputer for research through a competitive proposal process (www.emsl.pnl.gov/using-ems1).

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