Athlon supercomp gets an airing

Samson has 132 1GHz CPUs

By Lucy Sherriff • Get more from this author

Posted in Business, 22nd January 2001 12:35 GMT

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Updated The Bartol Institute at the University of Delaware is today showing off its clustered super computer based on AMD's Athlon processor. Nicknamed Samson, the machine is expected to rank in the top 200 supercomputers in the world.

The machine, which was first unveiled at last year's SC2000 supercomputer show in Dallas, will start off with 132 1GHz Athlons mounted in a chassis manufactured by RackSaver. The processors will be mounted in a "two dimensional torus", designed by Dolphin Interconnect solutions.

Eventually, the number of processors will drop to 128, as the interconnect scheme is upgraded from two to three dimensions, according to RackSaver executives. TechWeb reports that the processor chassis will, for now, be arranged in an 11x12 matrix.

We had written tha Samson was the first Athlon supercomp but our readers have provided us with the evidence that it's not.

Brandon Hanke writes: "I just wanted to notify you the University of Kentucky has had a cluster supercomputer based on the Athlon for a good long time now. KLAT2 you can see the info at www.aggregate.org. I believe this is the first clustered Athlon supercomputer and it does already rank in the top 200 136 or something like that. Also 3rd fastest in any unversity."

The Bartol Institute news conference will be held at the university at noon, local time. ®

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