Hawking Is First User of "Big Brain" Supercomputer 93
miller60 writes "Calling your product the 'Big Brain Computer' is a heady claim. It helps if you have Dr. Stephen Hawking say that the product can help unlock the secrets of the universe. SGI says its UV2 can scale to 4,096 cores and 64 terabytes of memory, with a peak I/O rate of four terabytes per second and runs off-the-shelf Linux software. Hawking says the UV2 'will ensure that UK researchers remain at the forefront of fundamental and observational cosmology.'"
Re:hawking's been hacked. (Score:5, Informative)
From the article it sounds like it. I find it hard to believe that Hawking wrote the line "soon to be supercharged with Intel’s MIC technology" they have him quoted as saying. Sounds like a PR flack programmed his speak-and-spell.
Re:Off the shelf Linux? (Score:4, Informative)
Is the standard linux kernel optimised for 4096 cores...?
Imagine a Beowulf Cluster ...
Re:Wrong. Both LInux and MS would be doing fine (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately both SGI and to a lesser extent Sun missed the signs that x86 PCs were going to rapidly catch up woth the abilities of their workstations and instead of dropping prices to sane levels continued to carry on business as usual as if it was still 1990. And the end result is what you see.
As a general statement, if they had kept up their research with their own processors, instead of trying to catch a ride on the Itanic [wikipedia.org] they would have kept ahead on capability for quite a while longer. It wasn't really that they missed the signs, it was that they stopped their own progress to all get on the same bus, not noticing that it was in the slow lane, with its blinkers on and belching smoke. By the time it got up to speed, x86 had already whizzed by.