US nuclear laboratory supercomputer packs a punch

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.infoworld.nl/idgns/bericht.phtml?id=002570DE00740E18882572300021D932

More details about the hardware held at the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory has emerged: it uses Panasas clustered file storage for its petascale nuclear weapons testing supercomputer.

A petascale supercomputer computes at the petaflop level - ten to the power 15 or one million billion floating point operations per second. Parallel supercomputers need parallelized I/O so that the many computing elements can be fed data fast enough to keep them operating at maximum speed.

Serial network-attached storage (NAS) products are not fast enough and clustered file system products, such as Isilon's have emerged to speed data delivery

LANL set up the very first (Cray) supercomputer which ran at 80Mflops. It now uses Panasas storage to supply seven terascale - meaning the one thousand billion FLOPS level - supercomputers with data, and is building the Roadrunner hybrid petascale supercomputer from AMD Opteron and IBM Cell processors, both running Linux.