sort of puts our little server in its place

**Pedro_The_Swift** · 8th May 2008, 09:05 AM

NASA confirms manned mission to 10 Petaflops

'Our Xeon binge is named Pleiades'

By Ashlee Vance in Mountain View → More by this author
Published Wednesday 7th May 2008 17:30 GMT

Well, well, well. It would seem that the 20,000-core supercomputer announced yesterday by NASA will just be the first course in an ongoing relationship between the space folk, SGI and Intel.
The three organizations have revealed a project dubbed Pleiades that will see them build Petaflop-class machines in the coming years. NASA reckons that such machines will be needed to fuel the manned missions to the moon and eventually Mars. In addition, it will look to use the gear for scientific research in a number of other related fields.
We're told that the 20,000 core Xeon-based system being built now at NASA Ames in Mountain View, California will serve as the basis for the first Pleiades supercomputer. But where the new machine is set to hit 245 Teraflops, the first Pleiades system due in 2009 will hit 1,000 Teraflops or a Petaflop. The organizations look to push that to 10 Petaflops by 2012.
SGI has a long-standing relationship with NASA Ames and could certainly use this type of business. And Intel makes out pretty well too.
Up until a couple of weeks ago, AMD had been winning most of the recent massive supercomputer deals with more than 10,000 Opterons making their way to a supercomputer in Texas and another at Los Alamos National Lab.
Intel, however, just busted into the formerly AMD-only Cray account, which means that Xeon should pop up in a number of the world's largest computers come 2011.
The SGI deal adds to this momentum, placing Intel right in the midst of the Petaflop race.
The Register's Silicon Valley staff will be looking out their office windows for all the Altix-carrying trucks heading to NASA over the coming months. Do give us a tour, boys. ®

**Disco_owner** · 8th May 2008, 09:43 AM

will our subscriptions be enough to pay for a Petaflop-class machine for our site?

**Pedro_The_Swift** · 8th May 2008, 09:46 AM

will it play Solitaire?

**abaddonxi** · 8th May 2008, 10:08 AM

Computers in space

OK, fast-forward to the present day, and the International Space Station.
The ISS is packed with processors to keep its crew happy, or at least alive, but at the core of its operational hardware are the Command and Control Computers.
They're 80386SX-20s.
But they've got 80387 co-processors! A couple even have hard drives!
Ahem.
Well, the ISS doesn't need a whole bunch of brains. It doesn't go anywhere but round and round.
What about the Space Shuttle?
Well, the Shuttles were originally equipped with five parallel redundant IBM AP-101 general purpose computers. Each of those was equipped with a mighty 1,310,720 bits of ferrite core memory (more had to be tacked on to accommodate the elephantine 700 kilobyte size of the Shuttle's control software...), and was good for a neck-snapping 0.48 MIPS and 0.325 MFLOPS.

Cheers
Simon

**Lotz-A-Landies** · 8th May 2008, 10:28 AM

Will it be just another big flop like so many other NASA missions in recent memory?

NASA = Need Another Seven Astronauts!

Diana

P.S. Inc. aren't you aiming for a yottaflop server ?(or should that be a Yacht-A-Flop)

**Bushie** · 8th May 2008, 04:54 PM

Originally Posted by Pedro_The_Swift

NASA reckons that such machines will be needed to fuel the manned missions to the moon and eventually Mars.

So maybe the last time they went there WAS a hoax

Martyn

**Stepho_62** · 8th May 2008, 05:09 PM

Blimey, n i was thinking I was doing well putting in 2 state of the art quad processor app servers and 5 SotA quad processor database servers.

Mind u, I made em grunt. They got loaded with 1.3 Billion records. Yes you read it right.

Cheers,

**p38arover** · 8th May 2008, 05:11 PM

Originally Posted by Bushie

So maybe the last time they went there WAS a hoax

Martyn

I am one of the many who believe it happened. I was working at Moree Satellite Earth Station during the first Apollo 11 moon mission. We handled the comms from Australia to Cape Canaveral. See http://www.honeysucklecreek.net/imag...tation_med.jpg

This envelope (sold on eBay a few years ago) shows we signed it on the day of the launch 17 July 1969 (one day after the American date - time difference, of course):

My signature hasn't changed much in the past 39 years.

This was Moree when I worked there:

Ron Beckett

**Pedro_The_Swift** · 8th May 2008, 05:32 PM

so if you hit a six--
did you have to go get the ball?

**Pedro_The_Swift** · 8th May 2008, 05:34 PM

Originally Posted by St3pho_62

Blimey, n i was thinking I was doing well putting in 2 state of the art quad processor app servers and 5 SotA quad processor database servers.

Mind u, I made em grunt. They got loaded with 1.3 Billion records. Yes you read it right.

Cheers,

er,,

what happened to the old ones?

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