____/ Mark Kent on Wednesday 27 June 2007 15:09 : \____
> Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
>> Sun's new supercomputer and switch are bigger than yours
>>
>> ,----[ Quote ]
>>| Sun has teamed with the Texas Advanced Computing Centre (TACC) in Austin to
>>| build the first "Constellation" system. The box dubbed "Ranger" is a Linux
>>| cluster with a peak performance in excess of 420 trillion floating point
>>| operations per second. The system is packed with 1.7PB of disk storage, and
>>| when finalised, will have 105TB of memory. The setup will take about 3
>>| megawatts of power to run.
>> `----
>>
>> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/26/sun_constellation_supercomputer/
>>
>> They give Linux/Solaris choice. They'll need to compete with non-Sun
>> hardware, which might be hard. Big Blue has just set a possible record.
>>
>
> The particular issue I would raise about this would be the power
> consumption; is it anything to be shouting about how /much/ power
> you're using? I'd like to see a little more consideration of global
> warming in these kinds of things. The UK is currently undergoing the
> worst summer floods on record at the moment, and it looks like getting
> worse.
IBM not only claimed this to be the fastest computer, but also the most
power-efficient one (IIRC). I suppose that with greater power available,
however, comes greed for more power to be devoured. As Microsoft said (quite
ironically it was them), human greed known no bounds. They actually talked
about somebody else -- a bunch of lawyers.
I can't recall how much datacentres consumption has grown since 2001 (I blogged
about it a couple of months back), but this was scary. These football
field-sized datacentres that Yahoo, Microsoft and Google set up have got a lot
of effort duplicated and their input almost exceeds that of... well, pretty
much anything that's /vital/. I remember reading about jet 'pollution', which
overall equates to that of all PCs combined. Makes you rethink long travel
journeys, doesn't it?
--
~~ Best of wishes
Roy S. Schestowitz | Windows: innovative VTP technology (Virus Transfer
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