Gordon, The World's First Flash Supercomputer
The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) has made an official announcement that they will be building a Supercomputer running on flash memory and using their own multiprocessors. Flash memory is a non-volatile computer storage primarily used in USB flash drives, memory cards and SSDs. This move by the Chinese is an effort to be independent of the Western companies like Intel and AMD. This would also mark a paradigm shift in the field of Supercomputers from good old spinning hard disks to flash-based storage.
Bob Sinkovits, applications lead for the Gordon project at SDSC, defends the Flash Memory usage, stating the number of advantages it has over traditional storage, notably higher bandwidths, lower power consumption, and better mechanical stability, leading to less issues of maintenance and repair. But the biggest advantage is the lower latency, which translates to lesser delay between request data and delivery of first byte.
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The flash computer, which is named Gordon after the popular sci-fi character <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Gordon" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Flash Gordon</a>, uses 300 terabytes of flash, spanning 1,024 high-performance Intel 710 series drives. Another feature that has been included to provide faster access is the introduction of "super nodes" which combines resources from multiple physical server nodes into one.  A "supernode" aggregates 32 of Gordon’s servers and two I/O servers into a single virtual cache. This unique architecture is designed by ScaleMP.
Allan Snavely, the SDSC’s associate director, affirms that Gordon is capable of operating large databases, up to 10 times faster compared to traditional memory. On New Year's Day, Gordon will officially become a research tool homing 16,384 compute cores and a theoretical peak performance of 340 Teraflops per second. A read and write speed of 200 GB per second is expected.
It now ranks 48th on the official <a href="https://www.top500.org/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Home - | TOP500</a> list of the fastest supercomputer in the world.
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Bob Sinkovits, applications lead for the Gordon project at SDSC, defends the Flash Memory usage, stating the number of advantages it has over traditional storage, notably higher bandwidths, lower power consumption, and better mechanical stability, leading to less issues of maintenance and repair. But the biggest advantage is the lower latency, which translates to lesser delay between request data and delivery of first byte.
#-Link-Snipped-#
The flash computer, which is named Gordon after the popular sci-fi character <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Gordon" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Flash Gordon</a>, uses 300 terabytes of flash, spanning 1,024 high-performance Intel 710 series drives. Another feature that has been included to provide faster access is the introduction of "super nodes" which combines resources from multiple physical server nodes into one.  A "supernode" aggregates 32 of Gordon’s servers and two I/O servers into a single virtual cache. This unique architecture is designed by ScaleMP.
Allan Snavely, the SDSC’s associate director, affirms that Gordon is capable of operating large databases, up to 10 times faster compared to traditional memory. On New Year's Day, Gordon will officially become a research tool homing 16,384 compute cores and a theoretical peak performance of 340 Teraflops per second. A read and write speed of 200 GB per second is expected.
It now ranks 48th on the official <a href="https://www.top500.org/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Home - | TOP500</a> list of the fastest supercomputer in the world.
Source: #-Link-Snipped-# Image Credit: #-Link-Snipped-#
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