Meet Gordon, the World’s First Flash Supercomputer [View all]

[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/