It is not just
the chips
Boffins running the San Diego Supercomputer Centre have sped
up a supercomputer by using solid-state drives.
Allan Snavely, associate director at SDSC, in a
statement. SDSC is a part of the University of California, San Diego said that
the new computer could help solve science problems faster than systems with traditional
hard drives. He said that a flash drive will provide faster data
throughput, which should help the supercomputer analyse data an
"order-of-magnitude faster" than hard drive-based supercomputers.
Data-mining problems that are essentially looking for a
'needle in the haystack' can be done about ten times faster if they worked out
on a supercomputer using SSD drives he said SDSC intends to use the SSD system,
called Dash, to develop new cures for diseases and to understand the
development of Earth.
The first system to use flash memory technology, the
system has already begun trial runs. It has 68 Appro International GreenBlade
servers with dual-socket quad-core Intel Xeon 5500 series processor nodes
offering up to 5.2 teraflops of performance at peak speeds. It has 48GB of
memory per node, which gives users access to up to 768GB of memory over 16
nodes.
It is based around Intel's SATA solid-state drives, with
four special I/O nodes serving up 1TB of flash memory to any other node.