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California Digital &
Lawrence Livermore Deploy Fastest Linux Cluster
23 Teraflop Peak System Is World's Second
Fastest
FREMONT, CA-[May 13, 2004]--Linux cluster vendor
California Digital, Quadrics, and Intel today announced that they
had successfully deployed the most powerful Linux supercomputer ever
built, a 4,096 Itanium2 processor based Linux cluster code named
"Thunder" at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
The
Thunder cluster delivers 19.94 teraflops of sustained performance,
making it the most powerful computer in North America. 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
B.J.Arun. "Thunder sets important benchmarks for massively-parallel
Linux computing."
Thunder uses 1,024 California Digital 6440
servers, each with four Intel Itanium2 1.4GHz processors with 4MB of
cache, 8GB of RAM, and 73GB of local storage. "Working with
California Digital and Lawrence Livermore has been a great
opportunity to demonstrate the absolute performance and scalability
that can be achieved with Intel's Itanium2 processor" said Intel
Enterprise Platforms General Manager Richard
Dracott.
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 communications required by today's
demanding scalable applications. With support for broadcast in
hardware and scaleable collective operations, QsNet^II scales
clusters efficiently to over 4,000 nodes.
Despite the
technical sophistication 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, biology, and inertial confinement
fusion.
"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 Xeon base
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 open source licenses as part of its freeIPMI project for
server management and configuration.
About California
Digital
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 based in Fremont, CA. 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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