With all the budget cuts that NASA has faced over the years, I’m glad they can still afford to buy technology that won’t be obsolete in less than 90 days.  Seeing deals struck with supercomputer giants gives me a little hope that the government-sponsored space agency is still tackling the difficult questions that need to be answered.  Questions like “how much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could Chuck Norris?”

The world may never know.

SGI Altix Supercomputer ClusterBut that’s not stopping one of the most inspirational organizations on the planet from purchasing a sexy new SGI Altix supercomputer for its Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Cailifornia.  This new super computer will be the first to operate 2,048 processor cores with a full 4 TeraBytes of physical memory under a single copy of Linux.  This will create the world’s largest single system image ever run with a Linux core, which will help accelerate research by making all of the system’s processors and memory available to solve a single problem, or several problems at once.

The Altrix supercomputer is scheduled to be delivered this coming August and will be driven by 1,024 Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 Processors.  When all working concurrently, this will generate a mind-numbing 13.1 TeraFLOPs of raw computing power.  In order to keep up with the massive system’s storage needs, NASA also managed to score a 240 TeraByte InfiniteStorage 10000 system to efficiently handle the loads.

I wonder what projects NASA will use the horsepower for.

The most processor intensive applications I use (now that I’m no longer developing enterprise-class software) includes Adobe Reader, and BOINC.  I’m sure Adobe Reader would still take about a minute to load on this impressive server, but I am really curious to know how quickly it could rip through SETI@Home and Einstein@Home workunits.  Heck, I’ve had a Quad-Xeon 5440 system running BOINC since April and it has only managed to finish 63 units of data.

While it might sound a little strange to say, I’m going to hope like heck that this kind of processing power has a sticker price in the hundreds of millions.  It woud be scary to consider what some software vendors would do if the average citizen had this amount of spare horsepower lying around.

Heck, I bet Adobe would find even more useless plugins to unnecessarily load with their applications.