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French atomic physicists count on Intel's Montecito
Posted by: duke on: 12/13/2004 03:20 PM [ Print | 8 comment(s) ]
Linuxworld.com.au has a post up about a group of French atomic physicists who will be counting on the upcoming dual-core Itanium 2 processor (Montecito) for a rather large cluster.
The Tera10 computing cluster will contain 4,352 of the chips, so far known only by their codename, Montecito, in 544 nodes. Tera10 will have a theoretical peak performance of 60T flops (floating-point operations per second), and will replace an existing 625-node computer, Tera, which has a peak performance of 5T flops, Verwaerde said. Tera uses Digital Equipment EV68 processors. The nodes of both Tera and Tera10 are interconnected using networking technology from Quadrics.More detailed information is available over here.
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terminalrecluse is home now Posts: 3802 Joined: 2004-08-07 |
#33403 Posted on: 12/14/2004 07:59 AM
Yikes that will be spendy. I would rather see it folding for the cause! 121 total Ghz, 304GB in total memory... Arch Linux - stable : 3930k @ 4.4Ghz, 64GB DDR3, 120GB Samsung 840, HX850 DAS - Norco 4020 - 20x Seagate 3TB, 1KW PSU FBSD 10 ZFS server - SM Chassis, SM X8DTE, 2x L5520 Xeons, 48GB Reg DDR3 ULP, IBM 5015 w/ 512MB DDR2 cache, RAID-50 - 42TB storage Dell C6100 - 4 nodes, 2 1.1KW psu's, 2x L5520s, 6x e5530s, 192GB reg DDR3 (48GB each), F@H, etc |
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Occupant Registered User Posts: 2421 Joined: 2002-03-04 |
#33404 Posted on: 12/14/2004 09:31 AM
Yup. Intel CPU's bringing safer nuclear weapons to a 3rd world army, near you... |
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terminalrecluse is home now Posts: 3802 Joined: 2004-08-07 |
#33405 Posted on: 12/14/2004 10:13 AM
Yeah what the heck are the french going to do with an uber super duper computer to simulate the end of the world? 121 total Ghz, 304GB in total memory... Arch Linux - stable : 3930k @ 4.4Ghz, 64GB DDR3, 120GB Samsung 840, HX850 DAS - Norco 4020 - 20x Seagate 3TB, 1KW PSU FBSD 10 ZFS server - SM Chassis, SM X8DTE, 2x L5520 Xeons, 48GB Reg DDR3 ULP, IBM 5015 w/ 512MB DDR2 cache, RAID-50 - 42TB storage Dell C6100 - 4 nodes, 2 1.1KW psu's, 2x L5520s, 6x e5530s, 192GB reg DDR3 (48GB each), F@H, etc |
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rmn oh my, it's huge! Posts: 6013 Joined: 2002-01-26 |
#33406 Posted on: 12/14/2004 11:19 AM
Well, obviously preparing for Bush's second term. RMN ~~~ |
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terminalrecluse is home now Posts: 3802 Joined: 2004-08-07 |
#33407 Posted on: 12/14/2004 11:43 AM
maybe one or two of the nodes will fall of the truck and I can have me one kick a** machine. 121 total Ghz, 304GB in total memory... Arch Linux - stable : 3930k @ 4.4Ghz, 64GB DDR3, 120GB Samsung 840, HX850 DAS - Norco 4020 - 20x Seagate 3TB, 1KW PSU FBSD 10 ZFS server - SM Chassis, SM X8DTE, 2x L5520 Xeons, 48GB Reg DDR3 ULP, IBM 5015 w/ 512MB DDR2 cache, RAID-50 - 42TB storage Dell C6100 - 4 nodes, 2 1.1KW psu's, 2x L5520s, 6x e5530s, 192GB reg DDR3 (48GB each), F@H, etc |
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The Emperor The dark side of smp Posts: 116 Joined: 2000-09-17 |
#33408 Posted on: 12/14/2004 03:27 PM
Amen brother To live is to die. |
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Calum Running on empty Posts: 1916 Joined: 2002-10-11 |
#33409 Posted on: 12/15/2004 05:09 PM
Atomic physics is more than just bombs, guys :rolleyes: France is a heavy user of nuclear power generation. Since this is being built by the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), I say that's a pretty good guess as to what the cluster will be used for. My Computers|2CPU.com SETI@Home Stats|My eBay feedback|My Heatware|Have you seen the future? |
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mjwood66 Registered User Posts: 87 Joined: 2004-12-02 |
#33410 Posted on: 12/15/2004 05:53 PM
I believe that atomic and nuclear research has contributed to such things as x-ray medicine, nuclear medicine, the laser (which is a household item), MRI and other magnetic research. Something as big as that French cluster is most likely not being used for nuclear fission research (that was figured out in the '20s...it is the engineering that is difficult), or uncontrolled nuclear fusion (i.e. hydrogen bomb). A SWAG (scientific wild ass guess) would be in the realm of controlled fusion plasmas. A controlled fusion plasma would make quite an impact on the world's energy situation. Since fusion occurs at temperatures in which most elements are in a gaseous state, a possible containment option is a magnetic bottle. Without getting too involved, the moving charged particles in the hot plasma would affect the magnetic field which would in turn affect the magnetic bottle, etc, ad infinitum, until the containment was broken or the fusion burned out. To study that involves serious non-linear calculations, probably some chaos theory, and high orders of predictive analysis of the quantum electrodynamic and quantum chromodynamic effects of the hot fusion in the bottle. Bomb making is simplistic. You can go to the library with an eighth grade education and learn the theory behind the nuclear fission and nuclear fusion bombs. (And France already has nuclear weapons.) The hardest thing in making nuclear weapons is not the science, it is the precision engineering equipment (which France has...as well as all first and second world nation, along with a few third world nations) and the enriched uranium, plutonium, or tritium (depending on your bomb choice). That is a bit more difficult to get...and France already has all of it. Contolled fusion, if it became possible, would solve the energy issues of the world. The hydrogen in a small amount of water would power all of France and Europe. There would be no polution. No fossil fuels. Only cooling towers to return clean water back the environment (thermal pollution is not good). The French are probably just looking for an alternative to what they have...safer, cleaner, and more powerful. But again, the controlled fusion is only a guess. Not everything dealing with atomic or nuclear physics is bad...I mean, those dual CPUs in your computer could not have been designed without an understanding and aide of atomic physics (quantum mechanics). And lasers can only be explained by quantum physics...they have no classical counterpart. Schroedinger's Cat lives...or not |