San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) officially announced the first supercomputer that uses flash storage rather than good old-fashioned spinning disks. Naturally, they call it Gordon. As in Flash Gordon.
The purpose of the all flash storage supercomputer 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 project is part of a larger trend in the supercomputer game, where systems are moving away from traditional components, toward new types of hardware that can improve speed, cost and efficiency.
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
- 64 terabytes of random access memory. 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.
- 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.
