Meet Gordon, the World's First SSD-Based Supercomputer
Gordon is now ranked as #48 on the official Top 500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world.
The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) reports that the world's first supercomputer based on SSDs came online last week using 1,024 high-performance Intel 710 series drives. It's also using software designed to aggregate resources from multiple physical server nodes into "super nodes." This grants users immediate access to data so that they don't have to wait for the system to access specific drives.
Named Gordon (as in Flash Gordon), the supercomputer uses 300 TB of flash-based storage to run massive databases up to ten times faster than traditional memory. It will officially become a research tool in early January and have 16,384 compute cores, a theoretical peak performance of 280+ Teraflops per second, and aggregate flash memory capable of reading and writing at just over 200 GB per second.
"Think of Gordon as the world’s largest thumb drive, but with the capability to ingest about 220 movies per second from Netflix, or consume the entire catalog of about 100,000 Netflix movies – while still having room for another 200,000 titles," the SDSC muses. "That’s a lot of popcorn."
Last week the SDSC said Gordon uses 64 TB of RAM, 4 PB of disk storage, performs at 36 million IOPS (input/output operations per second), and comes with a hefty pricetag of $20 million USD paid by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Gordon is also now ranked at #48 on the official Top 500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world, and deemed the most powerful supercomputer ever commissioned by the NSF for doing I/O and breaking the previous (2010) record of only 4.2 million IOPS.
“The era of data-intensive supercomputing begins with Gordon,” said SDSC Director Michael Norman. Every year we double the amount of information being generated, and we now are being overwhelmed by the data we are able to produce with our own computers. So it stands to reason that we needed a new kind of computer."
To read more about Gordon, head here.
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Well, we can now use this as part of an evidence to debunk myth about MLC SSD's unreliability and lack of longevity. Well done San Diego Supercomputer Center, an excellent choice of storage hardware.
Well I don't know about the specs, but if it can play Crysis then it's good enough...
Wow, $20m, reading the article I was expecting it to be much more!
i wonder what kind of processors it uses.
can it plaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy metro 2033 at max?
I want this in my room guys. Wow. Absolutely incredible.
Dear Gordon, as I am sure you are reading this, and everything anyone else is typing on the internet, I believe you to be the superior being, and would gladly serve you and do your bidding.
0k gyz, w3 h4v3 2 t3a/\/\ ^ 2 b34t 7h15 7h1ng.
When I think of Gordon, Gordon Freeman comes to mind. Not Flash Gordon.
comissioner gordon
or batgirl...
"a theoretical peak performance of 280+ Teraflops per second"
Teraflops is 'trillions of floating point operations per second', so no need for 'per second' following it.
I thought of Gordon Freeman all the time I've been reading the article
I think of Gordon Shumway.
I would love to render with that thing...
Dear Santa....
i guess it would take a week to complete the daily backup of the data
"a theoretical peak performance of 280+ Teraflops per second"Teraflops is 'trillions of floating point operations per second', so no need for 'per second' following it.
Maybe it is per second per second (seconds squared) as in an acceleration value. It starts out at idle then accelerates up to full speed!
Well, we can now use this as part of an evidence to debunk myth about MLC SSD's unreliability and lack of longevity. Well done San Diego Supercomputer Center, an excellent choice of storage hardware.
What is so offensive about my comment?
"a theoretical peak performance of 280+ Teraflops per second"Teraflops is 'trillions of floating point operations per second', so no need for 'per second' following it.
Maybe they plan on starting the singularity with it so have to put processing in terms of acceleration
yessssssss i have somenthing now to store my pORN!!!!!!!!!
Having this in your room sounds cool, until you see your electricity bill. >>
Having this in your room sounds cool, until you see your electricity bill. >>
Billgates can pay
Well I don't know about the specs, but if it can play Crysis then it's good enough...
nope it cannot as it doesn't have decent gpus and the gpus cannot be aggregated.
i wonder what kind of processors it uses.can it plaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy metro 2033 at max?
sandy bridge i7-2600 servers equivalent
Damn, killed my daydream about Gordon Freeman, but Flash, in this case, make a lot more sense.
Maybe they can use this to help try and decipher the Mammoth DNA, just please don't actually try to make one.
If I ever win the lottery, a really big one, where I could build one of these off less than half of one year's check, I'd totally do it. Then I'd have an open invitation for people to submit their proposed use of it. Oh the power...
"That’s a lot of pop0rn."
Fixed it for ya
Well, we can now use this as part of an evidence to debunk myth about MLC SSD's unreliability and lack of longevity.
The Intel 710 SSDs are meant for the enterprise though. Once we can get enterprise-grade reliability in consumer SSDs then I'm all ears.
[arkchazz :
Well I don't know about the specs, but if it can play Crysis then it's good enough...
nope it cannot as it doesn't have decent gpus and the gpus cannot be aggregated.
de5_roy :
i wonder what kind of processors it uses.can it plaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy metro 2033 at max?
sandy bridge i7-2600 servers equivalent][/quote]
It uses 8 core 2.6GHZ Intel Xeon E5-2670 processors.
HDD's are expensive nowadays : )
Brand New SSD's and it is only 48th on the list of most powerful computers? Somebody didn't plan their other hardware correctly.
When I think of Gordon, Gordon Freeman comes to mind. Not Flash Gordon.
Same here, I think because I saw the link here immediately following a video game ad on my facebook page.
How many HDDs would it take to match Gordon's IOPS?...
comissioner gordonor batgirl...
When I think of Gordon, Gordon Freeman comes to mind. Not Flash Gordon.
Ah. so it seems i'm the only one who saw a lot of intel hardware going into this and thought Gordon Moore...
The real question about it is... But will it be the savior of the universe?
When I think of Gordon, Gordon Freeman comes to mind. Not Flash Gordon.
Even though there's no such thing as "Freeman memory?"
Maybe they plan on starting the singularity with it so have to put processing in terms of acceleration
And people voted your comment down? I guess no one really appreciates (or possibly even understands) derivatives like that.
Brand New SSD's and it is only 48th on the list of most powerful computers? Somebody didn't plan their other hardware correctly.
The TOP500 list ranks computers on a specific benchmark, LINPACK: it's very good at demonstrating real-world 64-bit, floating-point SIMD capabilities, which is relevant for a lot of HPC applications, but hardly all of them. At any rate, using SSDs yields no benefit on that benchmark: it was for other, more vastly data-intensive applications, that the machine was designed for. Ones where the chief bottleneck wouldn't be how fast the CPUs could crank, but rather how quickly it could seek and produce stored data.