Cray Replaces IBM To Build $188M Supercomputer 99
wiredmikey writes "Supercomputer maker Cray today said that the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) awarded the company a contract to build a supercomputer for the National Science Foundation's Blue Waters project. The supercomputer will be powered by new 16-core AMD Opteron 6200 Series processors (formerly code-named 'Interlagos') a next-generation GPU from NVIDIA, called 'Kepler,' and a new integrated storage solution from Cray. IBM was originally selected to build the supercomputer in 2007, but terminated the contract in August 2011, saying the project was more complex and required significantly increased financial and technical support beyond its original expectations. Once fully deployed, the system is expected to have a sustained performance of more than one petaflops on demanding scientific applications."
Re:Aha. Bulldozer sucks my ass. (Score:3, Insightful)
Because of AMD's design glue logic is cheaper. You can see this reflected in the cost of all levels of motherboard for both AMD platforms vs. their intel competition. This is especially important in a supercomputer. AMD has been easier to build into massively parallel systems for longer. The intel processors are slightly snazzier dollar for dollar, but not that much more amazing. Therefore there are only two reasons you would use intel over AMD to build a supercomputer (cluster size, maximum power limitations) whereas AMD provides the advantages of a better-known platform for the purpose and an improvement in cost which can be significant over the total number of nodes. Since boards exist to let you have more AMD cores in a single system than intel cores, it remains a viable platform for supercomputing, and not just through momentum — though let's face it, how much of intel's success is due to the same factor?
Most car manufacturers put old technology in cars they're bringing out today because we keep buying it, and the same is true of computers.