For Media
SDSC: San Diego Supercomputer Center
Established: November 14, 1985
Employees: 250
Web site: www.sdsc.edu
Leadership: Michael L. Norman, interim director
High-performance computers:
Triton Resource - an integrated, data-intensive computing system designed to support UC San Diego and UC researchers, as well as researchers throughout the larger academic community, private industry and government-funded organizations. The Triton Resource has three key components:
- Triton Compute Cluster (TCC): A scalable cluster designed as a centralized resource, and a highly affordable alternative to less energy-efficient 'closet computers.' Provides an aggregate of 6 terabytes of RAM memory across 256 nodes, and a peak performance of 24 teraflops.
- Petascale Data Analysis Facility (PDAF): Consists of unique, large-memory (20 256GB and eight 512GB) 32-core nodes, with an aggregate of 9 terabytes of memory and a peak speed of 9 teraflops.
- Data Oasis: Scheduled to come online in late 2009 to accommodate large-scale disk storage. To provide up to 4 petabytes of extensible storage when fully deployed.
The anatomy of a byte:
- Byte: A unit of computer information equal to one typed character.
- Megabyte: A million bytes and equal in size to a short novel.
- Terabyte: A trillion bytes or about equal to the information printed on paper made from 50,000 trees
- Petabyte: A quadrillion bytes; the information found in all US academic libraries could be stored on two petabytes
- Exabyte: One quintillion bytes; every word ever spoken by humans could be stored on five exabytes
Rating a computers performance :
- Megaflops: A million floating point operations oer second; the original Cray-1 supercomputer was capable of 80 megaflops
- Gigaflops: A billion floating point operations per second; today's personal computers are capable of gigaflops performance
- Teraflops: A trillion (1012) floating point operations per second; the fastest supercomputers in the world are capable of achieving teraflops performance
- Petaflops: A quadrillion (1015) floating point operations per second; a frontier goal in computing expected within the next couple years
Some common uses for supercomputers:
