HP to build Linux supercomputer

Hewlett Packard (HP) has disclosed that it is to build a $24.5m Linux-based supercomputer for the US Department of Energy (DoE).

The company said that the computer for the DoE's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richmond, Washington State will be up and running early next year and will be the fastest Linux-based machine in the world.

The computer will consist of 1,400 Intel Itanium family processors (currently codenamed McKinley and Madison) offering a peak performance of 8.3 teraflops, or 8.3 trillion calculations per second. That would make the machine 8,300 times more powerful than the average office PC.

"This new computing power will advance scientific study in a host of areas and keep the DoE and our national laboratories at the cutting edge of technology," said US energy secretary Spencer Abraham.

The supercomputer is expected to be installed at the Molecular Sciences Computing Facility within the William R Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a DoE scientific user facility used for biological and environmental research.

The machine will have 1.8 terabytes of memory and 170 terabytes of disk space. One terabyte is equal to 1,024 gigabytes.