Thunder uses the new Quadrics QsNetII 64-bit technology to connect 1024 Intel Tiger Quad Itanium II Processor servers to deliver 19.94 TeraFLOPs/s on parallel Linpack. Peak performance of the system is 22.9 TeraFLOPs/s. The level of efficiency, at 87%, is unrivalled by other clusters and exceeds that of many vector supercomputers. Key factors in achieving these levels of performance and efficiency are the floating-point performance of Itanium II processor and the ultra low latency of the QsNetII interconnect.

"Thunder represents the next generation of Linux cluster for scientific simulation", remarked Mark Seager, Livermore's Assistant Department Head for Advanced Technology. "Our applications are seeing a 50% to 400% speed up over our Intel Xeon based clusters."

The new cluster enhances the existing LLNL simulation environment and integrates with three other existing Xeon - QsNet based commodity clusters. This combined 32-bit and 64-bit simulation environment now provides a total of 36 TeraFLOPs/s of Linpack Performance. Data sharing between the compute and visualization clusters is enabled by a single shared Lustre filesystem that runs both QsNet and Ethernet networks.

The LLNL simulation environment is a major achievement in supercomputing and an approach now being followed by similar organisations. "Thunder is a milestone in the use of commodity components in supercomputing", declared Duncan Roweth, head of software R&D at Quadrics, "providing not only massive computational power but also the I/O resources and operational environment necessary visualize and interrogate numerical simulations in situ".

Quadrics has collaborated with LLNL over the past 4 years to integrate its technologies in large-scale production Linux clusters that satisfy the Laboratory's demanding requirements in terms of performance, scalability and reliability. This collaboration has included system design, software development, integration and commissioning, code optimization, 24-hour mission critical support and further collaboration with LLNL third parties to optimize the whole simulation environment.

"This confirms our focus on high performance computing to develop our technology and motivate us to improve it on an ongoing basis; we are already working on the next generation of QsNet", concluded Cristoforo Romanelli, CEO of Quadrics.