Technical Specifications
The Computer itself took up almost 1600 square feet of space, and is made up of 104 "cabinets". Of those cabinets, 76 are computers (processors), 8 are switches, and 20 are disks. It has a total of 1212 GB of RAM, and 9298 separate processors. The original machine used Intel Pentium Pro processors each clocked at 200 MHz. These were later upgraded to specially packaged Pentium II Xeon processors, each clocked at 333 MHz. Overall, it required 850 kW of power (not including air conditioning). What sets ASCI Option Red aside from all of its predecessors in supercomputing is its high I/O Bandwidth. Previous supercomputers had multi-gigaflops performance, yet their slow I/O speeds would slow down, or bottleneck the systems. Intel's TFLOPS PFS is an extremely efficient "Parallel File System" that can sustain transfer speeds of up to 1 GB/s, eliminating bottlenecks.
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Famous quotes containing the word technical:
“I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it—yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don’t give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.”
—Orson Welles (1915–1984)