Sharing an interesting article
Albeit it's a specialized machine, that's still pretty effin' impressive! I thought it intersting that the primary server is a Xeon based machine considering all the press about Cray with their Opteron based machines.
Enjoy!
Structurally speaking, MDGrape-3 is a parallel computing system consisting of two main sections: a primary server unit and a specialized-engines unit...The primary server unit manages the engine cluster. This parallel server setup runs two different types of processors: 65 servers run dual-core Intel 5000-series Xeon processors, 256 per server; and 37 servers run 3.3-GHz Intel Xeon processors, each with 2 MB of level 1 cache, at 74 processors per server. This hardware structure enables the 1-petaflop speed...The (specialized-engines unit) is a cluster of 201 engines running proprietary chips developed by Riken specifically for MDGrape-3. It's this huge set of engines, running 24 MDGrape-3 chips each, that does the heavy protein-analysis lifting. Each chip has a maximum processing speed of 230 gigaflops (one billion operations per second).
Albeit it's a specialized machine, that's still pretty effin' impressive! I thought it intersting that the primary server is a Xeon based machine considering all the press about Cray with their Opteron based machines.
Enjoy!