Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 8.1 Small part of the Tera-10 supercomputer
weapons. The program provided for creation of a supercomputer “Tera” with
consistently expanded computing power. According to the program it was supposed
to reach 1, 10, and 100 teraflops (one teraflop equals 10
9
floating-point operations
per second) in 2001, 2005, and 2009, respectively. In the current version Tera-10 is
the most powerful European and fifth most powerful supercomputer in the world
and represents a computer system built around 4352 Dual-Core Intel Itanium
2 processors. The random access memory of Tera-10 is 27 TB, and its disk storage
capacity is 1 PB (1 petabyte
10
12
bytes). Figure
8.1
gives some impression of a small part of the supercomputer.
Unfortunately, the financial details of the project were not disclosed by Bull, the
company that develops the supercomputer.
But one should not forget that in addition to the price of the computer itself,
presumably tens of millions of dollars, the total cost of having these unique
capabilities is extremely high. To accommodate Tera-10, about 2,000 m
2
of spe-
cialized space is needed, not counting the space for auxiliary equipment. And these
facilities should be significant, since only for cooling the computer about 3 MW of
power is required (an increase up to 5 MW is already envisaged). Tera-10 consumes
1.8 MW of electric power.
10
9
MB
¼
1,000 terabytes
¼
1,000,000 GB
¼
¼
