On a fairly regular basis, some research lab or government institution needs computing power on a massive scale.  In this case it’s the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  They’re having Cray, an old hat at supercomputers, build them a system that should break the 1 petaflop barrier (that’s 1 quadrillion floating-point operations per second).  The next closest system currently in operation is IBM’s Blue Gene/L which turns out a quite respectable 350 teraflops. 

To achieve the necessary performance, the system (which goes by the name Baker) will utilize 24,000 2.6GHz quad-core AMD Opteron processors (96,000 cores!), taking up residence in 187 liquid-cooled cabinets.  Totally dependent on the cost of memory at the time of construction, Baker will be outiftted with 187 to 400 terabytes of memory (yes, you read that correctly - terabytes) and hard drive space will fall between 1 and 11 petabytes.  Baker is only in the design phase right now and won’t be operational until sometime in 2008, which coincidentally, is the same year IBM has targeted for expanding Blue Gene/L to 1 petaflop.

We can only imagine that a project of this magnitude has execs at AMD giddy as little school girls.

Read More | Cray via GCN