Gordon Supercomputer the first with all-flash storage
published December 12th, 2011 | categories: Hardware, Server | all categories
SDSC’s Gordon Supercomputer. Photo: Alan Decker
When the Gordon Supercomputer first comes online in January 2012, it will be the first to employ an all flash storage system. The Gordon Supercomputer calls the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) its home. The purpose of the all flash storage monster is to “help researchers tackle the most vexing data-intensive challenges, from mapping genomes for personalized medicine to rapidly calculating thousands of “what-if” scenarios affecting everything from traffic patterns to climate change.”
Gordon is ranked #48 in the top500 fastest supercomputers on the planet. The number of I/O per second with flash storage is absolutely mind numbing…
Gordon by the Numbers
- 4 petabytes of disk storage. One petabyte equals a quadrillion (1,000 trillion) bytes of information. It would take 1,900 years to listen to a petabyte’s worth of songs – if you had a large enough MP3 player!
- 64 terabytes of random access memory. Just one terabyte equals all the information printed on paper made from 50,000 trees.Gordon’s 64 terabytes of RAM is more than 16,000 times the memory of a standard MacBook Pro.
- 280+ teraflops of compute power. Supercomputers are typically measured in “FLOP/s” or FLoating point OPerations per Second, or the ability to do mathematic calculations at peak speed. A teraflop is one trillion floating point operations. A supercomputer capable of operating at one TFlop/s is about 150 times faster than having every person in the world performing one operation per second on a hand calculator.
- 300 terabytes of flash memory.Gordon’s 300 terabytes of flash memory is 4800 times greater than the storage capacity of a top-of-the-line 64GB iPad 2.
- 100,000 movies: That’s the entire Netflix movie catalog, whichGordon could ingest at the rate of 220 movies per second – and still have room for 200,000 more movies!
- 20,000,000 dollars. Gordon is the result of a $20 million, five-year grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a new kind of data-intensive supercomputer.
- 36,000,000 IOPS. IOPS means input/output operations per second, an important measure for data-intensive computing since it indicates the ability of a storage system to perform I/O operations on randomly organized data – critical for database and data mining applications. Gordon now holds the record for IOPS capability, outpacing the previous record holder by more than eight times.
Read more about Gordon at SDSC.
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