How much is a NASA supercomputer?
NASA, Navy Buy Massive Supercomputers
The market is expanding for powerful
system, IDC says
U.S. government agencies announced the purchase of two
supercomputers in the last week. The first is an enormous 10,240-processor
machine that will be used by NASA which is likely to be listed among the top
ten top computers.
It is the NASA system, which is made by Silicon Graphics
Inc., is built upon Itanium 2 processors that run Linux. The second system
is one of the IBM supercomputer that was purchased through the U.S. Naval
Oceanographic Office uses 2,944 Power4+ processors and runs IBM's AIX version
of Unix.
The Navy has not disclosed the worth of its agreement with
IBM. NASA's system is expected to cost around $50 million, which is an
unbeatable price considering that Intel Corp. and SGI along with other
companies, will be conducting research on the system under an agreement for
research according to an NASA spokesperson told.
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The two sales might trigger IDC to increase its market share
for high-performance technical computing number in the next forecast, according
to Chris Willard, an analyst at the Framingham, Mass.-based research company.
IDC last week reported its report that market share for
computers that are used for technical and research computing increased 14
percent to $5.6 billion in 2007. It will continue to expand at a rate of 6.5
percent through 2008. In 2008, the market is projected to be $7.6
billion. Commercial users are usually in the pharmaceutical, automotive,
and oil and gas industries.
But the market for most powerful computers, like those
bought by NASA is expected to expand by 2percent per year until the year 2008,
when it will grow from $771 to $849 millions. "There is only so much
money the world is willing to spend on this class of computers," explained
Willard.
The NASA system that will be utilized for space exploration
as well as studies on global warming, are a large-node cluster made up of 512
processors, shared memory as well as one instances operating Linux. Linux
operating system.
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InfiniBand I/O technology is utilized to connect the
processor systems of 512 that comprise the supercomputer. It will be located in
NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. It's scheduled to go
live by the end of November.
The navy's IBM supercomputer is made up of a cluster
consisting of 368 IBM eServer P655 systems. It's scheduled to be
operational in September. It will enable for the Navy to use bigger and more
precise models of ocean and weather which include one that shows the surface of
the earth. The supercomputer can also handle more diverse data produced
from satellites, buoys, along with other resources, according to Steve Adamec,
director of the Naval Oceanographic Office's Major Shared Resource Center
located at the John C. Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.
U.S. government agencies tend to purchase a range of
supercomputing equipment as well as Stennis Space Center which is where will be
the IBM machine will eventually be located is an example of that
variety. Apart from running the older IBM machines, the facility also has
systems manufactured by Cray Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc. and SGI.
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