Commodity hardware and Linux OS helps in building supercomputers at low-cost
Date: 31/07/2013
The cost of supercomputers is less expensive due to the availability of open source Linux OS. SUSE is offering enterprise class server operating system in Linux. SUSE Linux enterprise server OS is used by more than one third of the top hundred supercomputers in the world. SUSE says in past few years there are significant changes in high performance computing due to open source and new clustering technologies. The cost of supercomputers is coming down due to availability of low-cost hardware and Linux OS. Computing power of supercomputers is increased 1000X from fast few years which enables even mid-size organizations to have a supercomputer equivalent server on a commodity type hardware. SUSE says it leads in this domain by offering scalable, flexible architecture which can handle large number of CPUs.
“SUSE has invested heavily in developing solutions that enable the fastest computers in the world,” said Meike Chabowski, product marketing manager for Enterprise Linux Servers at SUSE. “The next step in supercomputing is to move from high performance to high productivity, and our partners like SGI, Cray and Teradata are helping to lead these advancements. Linux will continue to be an integral part of these revolutionary machines.”
When there is a need to process huge amount of data in real-time there is a need of high performance computer to do that. In today's scenario, a lot of industries have this task of processing huge data. Some of the examples given by SUSE include seismic analysis for oil exploration, aerodynamic simulation for motor and aircraft design, Hollywood special effects, molecular modeling for biomedical research, super-scalable business computing, and data mining and financial modeling for business analysis. SUSE says in theTOP500 list of supercomputers, there are 270 industrial supercomputers outside academic, research and government use, spanning all industries (with a peak in the Energy/Oil&Gas and IT Service Providers sectors). The fastest industrial supercomputer and number 11 on the TOP500 list is Pangea at Total Exploration Production in France, an SGI ICE X system running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
Bill Mannel, vice president of Servers at SGI, said, “More and more commercial customers are turning to High-Performance Computing to gain the necessary performance they need for their business. With the Pangea system at Total Exploration, SGI developed the fastest supercomputer used in an industrial environment. Partnering with SUSE enables us to use SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, an operating system that uniquely combines high scalability, flexible architecture and the ability to handle large volumes of CPUs.”
