LinuxMall.com: It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s a Supercluster!

[ Thanks to LinuxNews.com for this link.
]

“Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a
locomotive, able to scale 276 nodes in a single bound… the
Supercluster known as JET is designer Greg Lindahl’s latest effort,
and at the rate it’s going, it may be sending IBM’s Los Lobos to
the doghouse.”

“JET was unveiled last week by the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Forecast System Laboratory
(FSL) and High Performance Technologies Inc. (HPTi) at its Boulder,
Colo. home. Developed for mission-critical weather prediction, JET
will be processing about 4 Teraflops of data, or 4 trillion
arithmetic computations per second when its final upgrade is in
place. For now, Lindahl says that JET is blazing across Colorado’s
Front Range at a more moderate speed. “Four Teraflops [TF] is the
eventual speed near the end of the contract. Right now the peak
speed is 1/3 of a TF, and the highest speed observed on any real
program was 197 Gigaflops on the Linpack linear algebra
benchmark…”

“Lindahl has been working with HPTi since he left the University
of Virginia’s Legion project, where he built a 300-node Linux
cluster named Centurion. “I’m actually a newcomer to Linux,
although not to Open Source,” Lindahl says. “In (Astronomy)
graduate school, we had a cluster of Sun workstations, because that
was much more cost-effective than `minicomputers.’ We used a lot of
Open Source software like GNU [GNU’s Not UNIX] Emacs and TeX, a
typesetting system that’s good with equations. After I dropped out
of grad school and went to Wall Street to work for an investment
bank, I worked with a large cluster of Suns running Solaris, but we
still used a large amount of Open Source software, since it was
really handy to be able to fix problems. For example, we had SunOS
source, but not Solaris source, and so things that were routinely
fixed by us on SunOS never got fixed under Solaris.”

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