CNet reported today that a new super computer made in Pittsburgh was setting a new bar for the super computing industry. The new super computer by The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center his called Blacklight and has begun its operations today. It costs $2.8 million and was built by SGI.
The super computer was a collaborative effort by the University of Pittsburgh and the Carnegie Mellon University. The super computer has two sides each of which hosting 16 terabytes of shared memory. This shared memory lets each processor have full access to the memory.
SGI’s very own Altix UV 1000 is used to make this new super computer work. It is fully integrated with up to 256 sockets to support the 16TB shared memory over four racks. This enables it to deliver up to 18.5 teraflops of compute power for a single system image. The system has 512 of the eight-core processors which amounts to a humongous 4,096 processor cores. The whole system is built as blade servers in a rack cabinet stacked up to six feete high.
The system will be used for research into deep boffinology – genetics, fluid dynamics, software security, language processing, molecular biology and the physics of the early universe.
You can read more here.