California Digital: Thunder Roars
California Digital finished installation of its "Thunder" supercomputer last month for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., and achieved a top Linux benchmark as well.
"It's the world's fastest Linux cluster," said California Digital CEO B.J. Arun. The high-end, massively parallel Linux supercomputer was built with 4,096 Itanium 2 processors and was delivered with a price tag of about $20 million. The project cost was considered mild when compared with other supercomputers.
Intel President Paul Otellini, in a meeting with financial analysts earlier this month, said the project's price was about one-tenth the cost per teraflop of the fastest supercomputer in the world, the Earth Simulator.
"This opens up the supercomputer model to other markets," Otellini said. "People can institute supercomputing capabilities for one-tenth of the cost in the not-so-distant past."
California Digital's solution comes at a critical time in the 64-bit computing space for Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel. Rival Advanced Micro Devices, Sunnyvale, Calif., recently celebrated the one-year anniversary of its competing Opteron processor, with growing support from OEMs including Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and IBM.
A key to the solution was California Digital's leverage of distributor partner Synnex's 60,000-square-foot integration center at its Fremont, Calif., headquarters.
"This is something we want to do more of," said Steve Ichinaga, senior vice president of systems integration at Synnex. "It's a perfect fit for the data center we have. [California Digital] is the type of customer we want to have."
Arun said the distributor played a key role with both configuration and sourcing.
"We're only a 55-person company," Arun said. "Getting 1,000 Itanium 2 servers even from Intel is challenging enough without having to put them all together."