Korea is continuing its rapid deployment of clustered supercomputers. Last year, Samsung Electronics, Seoul National University, Microsoft and Intel joined forces to develop a 1 teraflop super computer. Now, the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KISTI) has announced plans to develop a supercomputer with a target speed of 2 teraflops, more than double that of SNUs system.
KISTIs supercomputer will be developed by IBM Korea and POSDATA, one of Koreas leading technology services companies, and will use Linux-based supercomputing clustering technology built around LG-IBM IA 513 servers using Networks of Workstations (NOW) technology to construct a Beowulf-type supercomputer.
The manager for this high performance computing project, KISTIs Gyu-hwan Lee, said that “processor and network performance is the key for cluster-based supercomputers. We chose to use 1026 Intel Zeon 2.4 GHz processors and Myrinets PCIXD-2 switch cards.”
Myrinets network switch card, announced in May, consists of a 225MHz RISC processor with a 64-bit 133MHz PCI-X BUS.
“We first adopted Myrinets technology for 512-nodes clustering and we can prove that the Myrinet cards can handle more than 2 trillion operations per second,” said Dr. Lee.
With the new supercomputer, KISTI, IBM Korea and POSDATA will establish a new Linux cluster supercomputer technology center by the end of September. Lee explained that the supercomputer will be used by KISTI as part of its R&D in areas such as Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS), bioinformatics, nano technology and virtual testing. IBM Korea expects the KISTI supercomputer to be among the worlds 20 fastest supercomputers. Seoul National Universitys Pegasus supercomputer, with a target speed of 1011 gigaflops, ranks 57th among the most powerful supercomputers in the world.
POSDATA meanwhile announced the deployment of a Linux-based render farm to offer rendering services to HanvitSoft, a local game services company. This cluster, built around HanvitSofts Soft Image XSI rendering software, can support a maximum of 320 processors. HanvitSoft plans to offer rendering services targeted at film makers, game developers and multimedia companies.