California Digital, a 55-person company located on the outskirts of Silicon Valley, created Thunder from 1,024 four-processor Itanium 2 servers to perform a variety of tasks at the lab.
Capable of performing 19.94 trillion operations per second, it would have ranked second in the Top 500 list of supercomputers published bi-annually by the University of Mannheim, the University of Tennessee and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, had it made the deadline.
The key to the setup, and many like it, is to use the Linux operating system to lash together a lot of comparatively cheap, off-the-shelf hardware to quickly create computers with enough power to simulate the potential effects of explosions or crunch data on galaxy formation. The machines can cost millions of dollars, but they're still about a third less expensive than traditional supercomputers of comparable power.
"The tier-one vendors don't have as much of a handle on this market as other areas," said Douglas Bone, president of California Digital, which has also installed large Linux clusters for several Fortune 500 companies. Other small companies are involved in the nascent field as well.
Utah's Linux Networx, for instance, is building two supercomputing clusters based on Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron processor for the Los Alamos National Laboratory: a 2,816-processor cluster will be used to study nuclear stockpiling, while a smaller 512-processor cluster will be dedicated to smaller problems with lower security clearances. The company is also creating a cluster with 2,132 Intel Xeon processors for the US Army Research Laboratory.
Other companies in the market include ProMicro; Poland's Optimus; and Verari Systems, formerly called RackSaver. Component specialists such as Mellanox and SuperMicro are also participating.
"They are getting serious traction," said Robert Pennington, interim director of the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications. "There were a couple of small companies trying to do this about five years ago, but they were just testing it."
The NCSA has had two major Linux clusters installed and is currently considering bids on another large cluster.
Sophisticated, but affordable
The turn away from monolithic machines stuffed with proprietary hardware and software built by companies such as IBM, Cray and NEC has come about through a combination of technological sophistication and appealing prices.
While computers such as NEC's Earth Simulator are still preferred for some tasks, such as weather prediction, researchers have found that most applications can be run on clusters of two- and four-processor assemblies from Intel or Advanced Micro Devices running Linux.
(Large clusters, including a much heralded one at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, have also been built out of Apple PCs running IBM chips. Srinidhi Varadarajan, the brains behind Virginia Tech's cluster, also serves as California Digital's chief technology officer.)
CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland contributed to this report.
