Regular readers of Climateer Investing know I have a fascination with really fast computers. This offer from the DOE is a big deal.
"The U.S. Department of Energy is inviting proposals for innovative, large-scale computational science projects. Researchers will be able to use some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers at DOE national laboratories. The advanced computers are not commonly available in academia or the private sector."
"...A project receiving one million hours could run on 2,000 processors for 500 hours, or about 21 days. Running a one-million-hour project on a single-processor desktop computer would take more than 114 years."
And this is what's on offer, the big dog: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has provided computing and storage resources for INCITE projects since the program was launched in 2003. NERSC’s newest system is a 19,496-processor Cray XT4 supercomputer, which will deliver sustained performance of at least 16 trillion calculations per second — with a theoretical peak speed of more than 100 teraflop/s.
Installation began in 2006 and the full system is scheduled to go into production service in late summer 2007.
Other computing systems at NERSC include an IBM POWER 5 system with 888 processors and a peak performance of 7.4 teraflop/s; a 740-processor Linux Networx cluster with a peak speed of 3.1 teraflop/s; and a 6,756-processor IBM supercomputer with a peak speed of 10 teraflop/s. To provide archival data storage for its 2,600 users, NERSC operates a High PerformanceStorage System (HPSS) with a current capacity of 22 petabytes, or three times the volume of information in the Library of Congress. Source
I mentioned the Oak Ridge National Laboratory yesterday. Their website's front and center story? "The Business of Biomass" Tenth fastest in the world
Argonne National Laboratory
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Number 74 on the top 500
