California Digital and Lawrence Livermore Deploy Fastest Linux Cluster; 23 Teraflop Peak System Is World's Second Fastest!Business Editors/High-Tech Writers FREMONT, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 13, 2004 Linux cluster vendor California Digital, Quadrics This is an article about the computing company, for use in mathematics, see quadric. Quadrics is a supercomputer company formed in 1996 as a joint venture between Alenia Spazio and the technical team from Meiko Scientific. , and Intel today announced that they had successfully deployed the most powerful Linux supercomputer ever built, a 4,096 Itanium(R) 2 processor based Linux cluster code named "Thunder" at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: see Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. (body) Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory - (LLNL) A research organaisatin operated by the University of California under a contract with the US Department of Energy. . The Thunder cluster delivers 19.94 teraflops of sustained performance, making it the most powerful computer in North America North America, third largest continent (1990 est. pop. 365,000,000), c.9,400,000 sq mi (24,346,000 sq km), the northern of the two continents of the Western Hemisphere. . Thunder also boasts the largest Itanium 2 processor deployment, as well as the largest implementation of Quadrics' low-latency QsNet(II) interconnect technology. These technologies allow Thunder to achieve record cluster efficiency of 86.9%, an important metric in measuring cluster scalability. "We're proud to have successfully delivered such a ground-breaking Linux cluster with world-record performance and efficiency," reported California Digital CEO (1) (Chief Executive Officer) The highest individual in command of an organization. Typically the president of the company, the CEO reports to the Chairman of the Board. B.J. Arun. "Thunder sets important benchmarks for massively-parallel Linux computing." Thunder uses 1,024 California Digital 6440 servers, each with four Intel(R) Itanium2 1.4GHz processors with 4MB of cache, 8GB of RAM, and 73GB of local storage. "Working with California Digital and Lawrence Livermore Lawrence Livermore may refer to:
Thunder's efficiency and scalability rest on the strength of its sophisticated interconnect technology, Quadrics' QsNet(II) offering. QsNet(II) (Elan4) provides the underlying high bandwidth and low latency MPI MPI - Message Passing Interface communications required by today's demanding scalable applications. With support for broadcast in hardware and scalable collective operations, QsNet(II) scales clusters efficiently to over 4,000 nodes. Despite the technical sophistication so·phis·ti·cate v. so·phis·ti·cat·ed, so·phis·ti·cat·ing, so·phis·ti·cates v.tr. 1. To cause to become less natural, especially to make less naive and more worldly. 2. of Thunder and the incorporation of new technologies, California Digital deployed Thunder in five months, speeding delivery of computing solutions to support Lawrence Livermore's national security and science programs in fields such as materials science, structural mechanics, electromagnetics, atmospheric science, seismology seismology (sīzmŏl`əjē, sīs–), scientific study of earthquakes and related phenomena, including the propagation of waves and shocks on or within the earth by natural or artificially generated seismic signals. , biology, and inertial confinement fusion Inertial confinement fusion (ICF) is a process where nuclear fusion reactions are initiated by heating and compressing a fuel target, typically in the form of a pellet that most often contains a mixture of deuterium and tritium. . "Thunder represents the next generation of Linux cluster for scientific simulation," remarked Mark Seager, Livermore's Assistant Department Head for Advanced Technology. "Our applications are seeing a 50% to 400% speed up over our Intel(R) Xeon(R) based clusters." Thunder uses a number of innovative open-source software tools developed by California Digital and Lawrence Livermore to manage the cluster effectively, leveraging the industry-leading remote management capability of Intel's Itanium2 system family. California Digital has released a number of these tools under GPL/ open source licenses as part of its FreeIPMI project for server management and configuration. About California Digital Corporation California Digital deploys clustered computing solutions for enterprise and government technical customers needing state-of-the-art turnkey solutions incorporating leading software, system, and interconnect technologies. California Digital is a privately held company privately held company A firm whose shares are held within a relatively small circle of owners and are not traded publicly. with worldwide headquarters in Fremont, CA and development centers in Blacksburg, VA and Bangalore, India. Information about California Digital is available at http://www.californiadigital.com or by calling 1-888-LINUX-4-U. Intel, Itanium2, and Xeon are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. |
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