Wednesday, September 2, 2009

SDSC Dashes Forward with New Flash Memory Computer System

The University of California, San Diego's (UCSD's) San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) recently unveiled Dash, a flash memory-based supercomputer designed to accelerate research in a variety of data-intensive science problems. Dash is part of the Triton Resource, an integrated data-intensive resource that was launched earlier this summer for use by the University of California system. Dash, which has a peak speed of 5.2 teraflops, is the first supercomputer to use flash memory technology in a high-performance computing system. "Dash's use of flash memory for fast file-access and swap space--as opposed to spinning disks that have much slower latency or I/O times--along with vSMP capabilities for large shared memory will facilitate scientific research," says SDSC's Michael Norman. "Today's high-performance instruments, simulations, and sensor networks are creating a deluge of data that presents formidable challenges to store and analyze; challenges that Dash helps to overcome." SDSC's Allan Snavely says Dash is capable of performing random data access one order-of-magnitude faster than other machines, allowing it to solve data-mining problems that are looking for the "needle in the haystack" up to 10 times faster than even larger supercomputers that use spinning disk technology.

Full Article @
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/supercomputer/09-09HPC.asp

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