The 4,096 Intel Corp 64-bit Itanium 2-based cluster is codenamed Thunder and was sold to Lawrence Livermore in November 2003 to support its national security and science programs in areas including structural mechanics, elecromagnetics, atmospheric science, and seismology.
Lawrence Livermore said it is seeing 50% to 400% application performance increases compared to its 32-bit Intel Xeon clusters.
The cluster was deployed in five months by Intel clustering specialist California Digital Corp, which acquired the systems division of the former VA Linux Systems Inc (now VA Software Corp) in 2001.
Thunder uses 1,024 of the Fremont, California-based company’s 6440 four-way 1.4GHz Intel Itanium 2 servers, each with 4MB of cache, 8GB of RAM and 73GB of local storage. The cluster also makes use of Quadrics Ltd’s low-latency QsNet interconnect technology, which enable it to achieve cluster efficiency of 86.9%.
The cluster also uses a variety of open source software tools to manage the cluster, which have been released by California Digital under open source licenses as part of its FreeIPMI project for server configuration and management.
