Meet Gordon, the World’s First Flash Supercomputer

[Soylent Brice]

Meet Gordon, the World’s First Flash Supercomputer



Supercomputers aren’t what they used to be. The Chinese are building a supercomputer with their own microprocessors, shunning American chip giants Intel and AMD. The Spanish are building one with cellphone chips. And this week, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) officially plugged in the first supercomputer that uses flash storage rather than good old-fashioned spinning disks.

Naturally, they call it Gordon. As in Flash Gordon.

Gordon uses 300 terabytes of flash, spanning 1,024 high-performance Intel 710 series drives, and the system includes new software designed to aggregate resources from multiple physical server nodes into “super-nodes,” so users have immediate access to data, rather than waiting for the system to access particular drives. Allan Snavely, the SDSC’s associate director, sees this as the world’s largest thumb drive. Flash memory is stuff used not only in USB thumb drives but cell phones and digital cameras.

*snip*

With Gordon, the big deal is its ability to handle data, says Nicholas Schork, a professor at the Scripps Research Institute, who helped build the first high-density map of the human genome 10 years ago and is now the director of bioinformatics and biostatistics at Scripps Translational Science Institute.

read more: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/12/gordon-supercomputer/

[HysteryDiagnosis]

1. And you can have one too for a price.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive



A solid-state drive (SSD), sometimes called a solid-state disk or electronic disk, is a data storage device that uses solid-state memory to store persistent data with the intention of providing access in the same manner of a traditional block i/o hard disk drive. SSDs are distinguished from traditional magnetic disks such as hard disk drives (HDDs) or floppy disk, which are electromechanical devices containing spinning disks and movable read/write heads. In contrast, SSDs use microchips that retain data in non-volatile memory chips[1] and contain no moving parts.[1] Compared to electromechanical HDDs, SSDs are typically less susceptible to physical shock, are silent, have lower access time and latency, but are more expensive per gigabyte (GB). SSDs use the same interface as hard disk drives, thus easily replacing them in most applications.[2]

[Occulus]

2. tigerdirect.com and newegg.com

SSDs are particularly attractive as system drives at the moment due to the flooding in Malaysia and elsewhere; I priced an external drive I previously bought for about $90 at the same location last night out of curiosity and the price had more than doubled.

While more expensive, the major advantage of an SSD is speed. They're much faster, and in fact you can often give an old laptop a new lease on life by replacing its traditional plate-based drive with an SSD. 60-64GB SSDs are around $120 at the moment, which sounds like a lot until you actually use one. Your PC goes from turned off to on the desktop in around fifteen seconds.

I strongly recommend using one as your OS drive. You will never want a regular drive for that again.

[cliffordu]

3. Yummy. I like really fast computers.........

[Scuba]

4. Yet many DU2/3 users would complain because they miss changing tapes. n/t

[Orsino]

5. Gordon's alive????

Dive!

[RoccoR5955]

6. I wonder what the limit of writes to these SSDs is.

It better be high, if they actually expect to do any work on it, or they'll be replacing them.
I understand the benefits of SSDs, but one of the major drawbacks it that there are a limited number of times that you can write to the chips before they fail. Yeah I know that the MTBF in the specs is high, but it's been my experience that these devices fail if they are written to too much.