US Department of Defense takes aims with Linux

Linux Networx has sold five supercomputers to the US Army Research Laboratory

Linux supercomputing company Linux Networx announced today that the High Performance Computing Modernization Program at the US Department of Defense has placed the largest single order for Linux supercomputers in the company's history.

The purchase of five supercomputers increases the Army Research Laboratory Major Shared Resource Centre's computing capability to over 80 trillion floating-point operations, making it one of the largest computing centres within the Department of Defense.

The Department of Defense will purchase three Advanced Technology Clusters (ATC) and one LS-1, and an additional LS-1 for Dugway Proving Ground.

The Linux supercomputers are part of the Technology Insertion 2006 initiative to modernise the Department's high performance computing capabilities.

The three Linux Networx ATCs will be installed at the Army Research Laboratory this summer. The most powerful is expected to be ranked in the top 20 of the world's most powerful computer systems.

It is a 1,122-compute node supercomputer with 4,488 mid-voltage 3.2GHz Intel Dempsey cores for computation. This system will increase the Army Research Laboratory computational capability by more than 28.7 TFLOPs.

The system will also have 112 3.46GHz cores (28 nodes) for log-in, storage and administration with 9.4TB of memory and 260TB (raw) of disk. All nodes will communicate via a 4X DDR (20Gbps) Infiniband network with 10GigE uplink capability. The 3.2 GHz mid voltage chips were selected for the compute nodes due to their thermal efficiency.

A second system is also expected to be ranked in the top 20 of the world's most powerful computer systems. An 842-compute node ATC, it will comprise 3,368 mid-voltage 3.2GHz Intel Dempsey cores for computation. The system will increase the computational capability by more than 21.5 TFLOPS.

The third system is a 68-core test and development system with 7TB of disks to be delivered in advance of the other two systems.