Installation of Blue Waters Petaflop Supercomputer Begins 86
An anonymous reader writes "The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois is finally getting the troubled Blue Waters supercomputer installed. After IBM walked away from the project after 3 years of planning, Cray stepped in to pick up the $188 million contract. Now, in around 9 months time, Blue Waters should be fully operational and achieve performance of 1 petaflop or more. As for the hardware... who wouldn't want access to 235 Cray XE6 cabinets using AMD 16 core Opteron 2600 processors with access to 1.5 petabytes of memory (4GB per chip) and 500 petabytes of local storage."
Re:Um, me (Score:5, Insightful)
No they have not. Take a look at multicore spec test at http://electronicsnexus.com/articles/Opteron-Xeon-Benchmarks-2012-01.aspx [electronicsnexus.com] where the 4x6282SE Opteron is the fastes 4 processor system testet. Or to quote
"For example, note that the top-end 16-core 6282SE Opteron is a match for the top-end 10-core Xeon on floating point, and is not far behind it on integer either"
Oh and the opteron cost less then half the price of the 10-core Xeon chip. So I think that slightly better floatingpoint performance, for less then half the price, make opteron the obvious choice, assuming you can split the workload so you can really use all the cores. Something I assume they master, since they are going to run their code on more then 1000 cores at a time.