The University of Edinburgh in Scotland has some serious horsepower to play with, and far more is on the way. The school recently announced that it has taken possession of a Cray XT4 supercomputer. This puppy can be souped up with as many as 120,000 AMD Opteron cores, and can peak at a petaflop. This is just stage one. Next year the University will get a Cray X2, a system Cray claims is the “first integrated hybrid supercomputer.”
In 2009 the school is set to take hold of a massively parallel processor Cray machine. Sounds like the University of Edinburgh will have quite a lineup!
The Universityof Edinburgh isn’t exactly new to supercomputing. As we reported late last year, the school is working with several other institutions on nanowire technology that could result in a palm-size supercomputer.
I can see the processing engines getting that small, but what about the storage and IO? Is a supercomputer going to really rely on a tiny 80 gig iPod-style solid state drive? Don’t think so!

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