Sure, the definition of supercomputer keeps changing all the time — today’s tablets are as powerful as supercomputers a couple of decades back — but for now, the core specifications of Western Australia’s latest processing monolith are to drool for.
Computerworld reports on Fornax, the latest supercomputer acquired by the iVEC group as part of the consolidated Australian/New Zealand bid for the Square Array Telescope. Fornax’s base specifications are pretty staggering; according to the report, it boasts
96 nodes, each containing two 6-core Intel Xeon X5650 CPUs, an NVIDIA Tesla C2050 GPU, 48 GB RAM and 7TB of storage. All up, the system has 1152 cores, 96 GPUs and an additional dedicated 500TB fabric attached storage- (FAS) based global filesystem.”
That’s not a picture of Fornax above, but it’s not just me thinking that Fornax sounds like a Futurama robot, right? [Computerworld]
Image: gimpbully
Shepard
Friday, September 30, 2011 at 11:41 AMThis isnt fornax.
http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Fornax this is Fornax
Corteks
Friday, September 30, 2011 at 11:56 AM+1
This was my very first thought too!
vaykant
Friday, September 30, 2011 at 1:31 PMFornax would sit on the top 500 supercomputer list between 480 and 500. that is pretty low on the list – not really something to brag about as far as supercomputers go.
Graeme
Monday, October 3, 2011 at 4:39 PMYeah, but this is WA. The next most powerful computer is VAX.