Gordon: Supercomputer with SSD

The processing capacity of supercomputers have shown some really leaves us surprised, but even these high performance systems must yield to the hard drives and the sacrifice in speed represent, in exchange for a high storage density and a relatively low cost . But in the Supercomputer Center San Diego, have developed a different idea and that idea is named after Gordon. Gordon is the world's first supercomputer that uses massive amounts of solid state drives, thanks to which users can access their reading and writing speeds close to 200 gigabytes per second.

It is without doubt a vicious circle. Solid state disks have shown benefits in terms of speed and power consumption, but the main barrier to their widespread adoption is still the price. And the price drops, we need cheaper manufacturing methods ... but also an increase in demand. With the prospect of hard drives affected by floods in Thailand, the feeling that "this" is the time for the SSD can be detected almost everywhere. In lieu of a general change of platform, the installation of a SSD is becoming a logical choice to upgrade our systems. And if that happens on desktop computers and laptops, why can not pass between servers and supercomputers?

People Supercomputer Center San Diego recently announced that it has put online to Gordon, a supercomputer that is already ranked 48 of the known list of "Top 500". This is a monster of 16,384 cores, 64 terabytes of RAM, four petabytes of storage space, and what brings us here today, 300 terabytes of solid state storage, thanks to the installation of a total of 1.024 units of Intel 710 high performance and 300 GB each. This space will allow users to access databases up to ten times faster than they would if they were stored on hard drives.

Gordon (named by Flash Gordon) has faster read / write of 200 gigabytes per second. As expected, the cost of Gordon has been quite high, about $ 20 million to be precise, but more than a thousand SSDs inside, and a theoretical maximum of 280 Teraflops, it seems money well assigned. Michael Norman, director of the Center in San Diego, stated forcefully that "double the amount of information generated every year," and the current systems are already "overwhelmed." Personally, I hope the presence of the SSD from supercomputers to increase. Not only increase the performance of these systems, but also stimulate demand in the market. And we want SSD cheap, there's no doubt.