The latest Quadrics based system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, called Thunder, delivers world-record performance for a commodity Linux cluster. www.top500.org
Quadrics has collaborated with LLNL over the past 4 years to integrate Quadrics technologies in over six large scale commodity based clusters to ensure that the demanding production performance, scalability and stability requirements of the Laboratory are satisfied.
The Itanium2 based Thunder with QsNetII enhances the existing LLNL simulation environmentand integrates with the three other existing Xeon based commodity clusters with QsNet. This combined 32-bit and 64-bit simulation environment provides a total of over 36 teraflops of Linpack performance. Data sharing between compute clusters and visualization clusters is enabled by a single shared
Lustre filesystem that runs over both QsNet and 1 Gb/s Ethernet networks. The LLNL simulation environment based on commodity Linux clusters with QsNet and multi-cluster Lustre filesystem is a major achievement in supercomputing. This approach is being followed by similar organizations.
"Thunder represents the next generation of Linux cluster for scientific simulation," remarked Mark Seager, Livermore's Assistant Department Head for Advanced Technology. "Our applications are seeing a 50% to 400% speed up over our Intel® Xeon® based clusters."
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