Science Fair Project Encyclopedia
Quadrics
This is an article about the computing company, for use in mathematics, see quadric.
Quadrics is a supercomputer company formed in 1996 as a joint venture between Alenia Spazio and the technical team from Meiko Scientific. They produce hardware and software for clustering commodity CPU into massively parallel systems, and in June 2004 the 2nd and the 3rd fastest supercomputers in the world use QsNet, Quadrics interconnect.
Their first design was the Elan2 network ASIC, intended for use with the UltraSPARC CPU, attached to it using the UPA syastem bus. Plans to introduce the Elan2 were later dropped, and a new Elan3 hosted on PCI introduced instead. By the time of its release Elan3 had been re-aimed at the DEC Alpha/PCI market instead, after Quadrics had formed a relationship with DEC.
The combination of Quadrics and Alpha EV6 CPUs proved very successful, and Digital/Compaq rapidly became one of the world's largest suppliers of supercomputers. This culminated with the building the largest machine in the USA, the 20TFLOP ASCI Q , installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2002/2003. This machine consists of 2048 4*1.25 GHz CPU EV67 Alphaserver SC ES45 nodes, and two rails of the Quadrics QsNet network.
Quadrics also had success in selling Linux based systems, with the fastest Linux cluster in the world called Thunder installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2003/2004, Thunder consists of 1024 Intel Tiger Quad ItaniumŪ II Processor servers to deliver 19.94 teraflops on parallel Linpack. Peak performance of the system is 22.9 teraflops. The level of efficiency is 87%.
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Quadrics products
Hardware
- QsNet I - Quadrics interconnect based around the elan3/elite3 ASICs (350MBs @ 5us MPI latency)
- QsNet II - Quadrics interconnect based around the elan4/elite4 ASICs (900MB/s @ 1.5us MPI latency)
- QsNet II E-Series- a range of small-medium configurations (8-128-way) at USD 1,800 price/per port
Software
- RMS - a cluster resource manager software package
- Quadrics Linux Software - core components of the QsNet software release for Linux under the GNU Public License
External links
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